Woodworking without using power tools at all is still regarded as being a little against the grain, and despite the resurgence in the popularity of woodwork in recent years, many of the most popular magazines and blogs (particularly Fine Woodworking Magazine), still stress the use of machines. That doesn’t mean these aren’t great resources, but sometimes it’s nice to read about other hand tool workers, to help remind us that we aren’t totally crazy. So, here’s a list of my favourite online resources. Whether you use hand tools exclusively or not, if you enjoy woodwork, you’re going to love these links.

Roy Underhill

There’s a reason we call him St. Roy. Roy Underhill has been the champion of hand tools woodwork for more than 30 years, which is how long his show “The Woodwright’s Shop” on PBS (in the USA) has been running. You can watch the last few years of this online, and every episode is well worth it. Roy’s books are also excellent, and his latest book is probably my favourite woodwork book at the moment. Watching the Woodwright’s Shop isn’t just great for the interesting skills that it teaches, it’s great because Roy makes hand tool work fun.

St. Roy’s Website: http://uncpress.unc.edu/woodwright/index.html

Logan Cabinet Shoppe

Bob Rozaieski runs this great site detailing his hand tool woodworking exploits. Go subscribe to his blog, and his podcast. In particular, his video podcast is proving do be one of the best resources around for getting into hand tool woodworking from scratch. After getting inspired by watching a few episodes of the Woodwright’s Shop, go watch Bob’s videos to get yourself started with the details.

Logan Cabinet Shoppe: http://logancabinetshoppe.weebly.com
Blog: http://logancabinetshoppe.weebly.com/blog.html
Podcast: http://logancabinetshoppe.weebly.com/podcast.html

Note: To subscribe to the podcast in itunes, open one of the episodes in it’s embedded video player, click on the little “packman” icon, and click on the subscribe tab. Or, just search for it in the itunes store.

Dan’s Shop

Another must-read blogger, Dan has been providing detailed explanation and pictures of his hand tool woodwork for quite some time. There’s a huge backlog of interesting stuff to read there, including good descriptions of the sets of tools used to build each project. In particular, you want to start with “the whole story in three pictures”.

Dan’s Woodshop Blog: http://dans-woodshop.blogspot.com/

The Village Carpenter

Kari Holtman doesn’t use hand tools exclusively, but she uses them a lot, and seems to be coming over to the dark side even more of late. Her blog is always detailed, well photographed, and inspirational. Again, reading back through the articles is well worth it.

The Village Carpenter Blog: http://villagecarpenter.blogspot.com/

Wow, from nothing much happening we’ve suddenly been going hammer and tongs in homesteading type activities. In a delightful twist to our Sunday afternoon scheduling, we ended up at the beach down the road with friends harvesting muscles, clams and even a few pippis. Hugh (of River Cottage fame) would have been proud. We managed to get a substantial enough hoard of sea goodies to make an amazing pasta dinner.

There really is nothing finer then eating a feast of food harvested and cooked by your own hands. The only way to have improved this dish would have been to make the pasta ourselves (we ran short of time, but next time for sure).

First I washed the shell fish in the laundry sink, getting rid of excess sand. Then I steamed them open in batches (discarding any that didn’t open). I then scooped out the insides and pulled the beards off the muscles. A dash of riesling to complete the reduction, pasta into a pot of boiling water and voila! A meal to drool over.

Blogging and cooking are both things I’m finding very little time or energy for at the moment, much to my distress. However, I have managed to turn my hand to making some Lemon Butter (Curd) with some success. I had to try setting it twice (as in I thought I had cooked it enough, bottled it only to have to cook it a second time because it was too runny). It still wasn’t quite set enough, but it made a lovely lemon curd tart which Craig and I happily devoured over a few days. I have another bag of locally grown lemons to have another go – I just have to find enough time (it takes longer then a single baby sleep cycle to make and at the present Will is still in need of help to resettle during the day ). I’ve made lemon butter successfully in the past so all I can think of is that I had a lot more time to stand slowly stirring a pot over low heat in the past. I do get inspired by lemon butter and want to make orange butter, lime butter, lemon and passionfruit butter and all sorts of other combinations, one day

The other joy in the kitchen recently has been our “italian” inspired week of dinners. Last night I made what was going to be cannelloni into a lasagna instead. I made the pasta dough on Saturday and then put it through the pasta maker last night. We actually left it to hang while we pottered around doing other things and so the past dried and thus we were unable to roll it into cannelloni. In the future we will make the filling for the cannelloni FIRST then roll out our pasta. I have to say that this has been one of the tastiest kitchen mistakes I’ve ever made. I layered the pasta with a home made sauce of tomatoes, bacon (cured by a local, SO GOOD), onion and garlic, then the main filling was 1 egg, 60g of parmesan and mozzarella cheeses, 140g local ricotta, parsley and 1 head of silverbeat (cooked). All these ingredients were mixed up then dolloped onto the pasta. Everything bunged in the oven for a little while and served with a fresh salad. We finished off the last of it for lunch today.

Craig is also getting back into the kitchen, trying his hand and baking bread of a morning. We pulled out the grain mill and milled our own flour yesterday, using two different sifters to get a nice light flour. There are now two lovely loaves rising on the dinning table.

I’m reading back over this email and realising that there is so much missing, so lets see if I can add anything. The flour mill is an attachment for our Kenwood Major (make sure if you buy one that you demand your stainless steel attachments and not the coated rubbish they give you, the sticker on the machine say’s “stainless steel”). So anyway, Craig has been using the mill to grind coffee recently but we have finally put it to use for it’s intended purpose (although we had to ditch the first batch of wheat we’d been holding onto for ages because it had a bad case of itty black weevils). We are using the slowest setting to grind so that we can avoid “burning” the flour. The difference in taste of freshly ground flour compared to pre-purchased is huge so the time it takes to mill is worth it. We are currently letting the milled flour fall into a large bowl sifter over another bowl so that we can separate the flour from the bran. The bowl sifter has fairly large holes (for a mesh sifter), we are then discarding the larger grain husks and sifting the flour once more with a finer mesh to get our flour. This second lot of sifting actually results in flour and fine bran, which we intend to try cooking with. The larger waist is probably going to end up on the garden. It took most of the morning to grind and sift 700g’s of flour so we are thinking about ways to make this process faster. The sifting is what really takes the most time as the mill can be left to it’s own devices while we go aff and do other things. At the moment we are thinking of making a tiered box system with different grades of mesh so that we can just shake the box and have everything work it’s way down to be collected in three separate boxes.

A long while back I said that we had a new adventure ahead of us, I promised details and now I have a few minutes to tell you about it.

As you know, we have a new son, William, who is now almost 10 weeks old. He’s growing well and developing wonderfully well, keeping us very busy and pretty tired and deliriously happy. 2 weeks ago tomorrow we bundled him up into his car seat and headed off on a long drive from Auckland to Wellington, stayed with friends over night and then hopped a ferry to the South Island, another 2.5 hour drive and we ended up in our new home. That’s right, we have moved islands, from the wet and grey winters of Auckland to the perpetually sunny crisp winters of Motueka.

Now you might think that it’s simply the joy of living in a sunny environment that would encourage this move, well that turns out to be just a bonus. We’ve actually moved here to be part of a new eco-village called Atamai. Atamai Village Council currently owns around 30 ha (74 acres) of land on the Motueka Valley Highway, and has the option to lease or purchase a further 69 ha (170 acres). The sight is divided up into mostly commons plus 11 lots around 1 to 2.5 acres and an intensive housing area similar to Earthsong eco-neighbourhood (where we are selling our gorgeous studio apartment).

We plan to purchase a 1-2 acre block where we will build our traditional timber framed home. There are still several lots available for sale in Atamai and they haven’t even started on the intensive housing sight. We’ve been here for less then 2 weeks and already we are organising pot-lucks and a heard of 20 goats. It’s an extremely exciting time, with everything at the very early stages. The land has been purchased, the council permissions received and development just starting. Transition Towns, Carbon Neutrality, Climate Change, Community Development and Community Currency are all high priorities for those fueling the project.

I’m going to end with a few photos of the sight from our January trip and a link to more.

Currently this is the only pond on the sight, but once the main earth moving has been completed every property will be in easy access (I believe bordering) a body of water like this.

This is the river across the road from us.

More photos of the property are here.

William Noel Peregrin Ambrose

We’re just recently back from the hospital with our new baby boy, William. The delivery was a little scary, and then having him with us was so wonderful, that I couldn’t help thinking that I need very little else to be happy. If my basic needs were met (food, shelter, warmth, air, etc), and I had meaningful work and Tracey and William to hang out with, then what other things are there that would be critical to having a good life?

In practice, I think I’m exaggerating somewhat. I have plenty of other hopes, dreams and desires, but dwelling on that thought of us sitting around the fire in a little cabin somewhere, little-house-on-the-prairie style, is a most pleasant image. The key here is simplicity.

Simplicity is something that has been on my mind a lot of late. I believe that it’s an important aspect of living a full and happy life. I haven’t quite figured out how strongly we should consider simplicity, as opposed to other criteria for good living, and I also haven’t quite figured out what simplicity means to me, but I’m convinced that it’s important.

I’ve called this post “The Simple Life”, which is of course one of those phrases that is so common in our language that even Paris Hilton uses it. The simple life has come to mean a return to small farming. Now, I love small farming, but I also think that this term is a gross misnomer. Farming and maintaining a homestead is anything but simple. In some ways, it seems to me that the simplest life I could lead would be to live in a serviced apartment in the middle of the city, to program computers all day, order in all my food, and spend my leisure hours sipping gin and tonic on the balcony. However, at the same time it’s clear to almost all of us that modern life has become too complex, and that as a result we have not necessarily experienced the increase in happiness and satisfaction over previous generations which would seem (on the surface) to be the goal of industrialised society.

It’s fairly obvious that a lot of advances of recent decades have not succeeded in making our lives simpler. When the first car came along, we thought “wow, great, now I can get to work and to the market in a fraction of the time that it takes on my horse”. That was true initially. We got to work faster, but then work got further away. Now, we spend more time commuting than before the car was invented. Plus, we have to labour at our jobs for weeks each year to pay for the privilege of having a car, and pay taxes to cover the government subsidised costs of motoring (road construction, etc). Maybe if we had known this all in the beginning then we would have thought better of the whole thing.

Voluntary Simplicity

So perhaps simplicity is about rejecting some of the assumptions which our civilization has made if we find that they make our lives more complex. One famous book in this field is Voluntary Simplicity, by Duane Elgin. This book is actually the result of a survey of people attempting to live a life of voluntary simplicity or frugality. Obviously, what it means to them varies wildly, but it tended to not be far off the images evoked by that phrase, “The Simple Life”. Hard work, frugal living, back to the land.

An alternative viewpoint is provided in Walden, that classic american biographic novel by Henry David Thoreau. Published in 1854, it tells the story of Thoreau’s years living in a cabin which he built by Walden pond, and carefully designing his lifestyle so that his needs were simple enough to meet with the bare minimum of work and obligation. Unlike the respondants to Elgin’s study of voluntary simplicity, Thoreau doesn’t seem at all fond of constant manual labour, in fact it’s his wish to labour far less than those he sees around him on working commercial farms. He eats a very simple diet of bread and rice, vegetables and a bit of dried meat, and he turns down offers such as a door mat, when he considers what it will add to his life in comparison with what effort it might take to maintain. Thereau’s goal then is to remove complexity from his life so that he can spend as much of it as possibly thinking and philosphising, which he believes is a much richer human experience than working hard to achieve small periods of expensive leisure.

Thoreau’s definition of simplicity seems to me to be an accurate one, and his books worth reading, but it’s not the ingredient that I’m looking for in my life. I don’t want to work less, I want to integrate work with my life, rather than keeping it separate as I do when I program computers so that in my spare time I can spend hours at leisure with my family. However, I applaud Thoreau’s thinking in considering each expectation which society places on him and deciding whether it really is making his life better.

A Handmade Life

A very pleasing middle ground is found in the book “A Handmade Life” by William Coperthwaite. This is a very close competitor for my “favourite book ever” at the moment (jostling for space with “A Pattern Language” and of course the Lord of the Rings). Coperthwaite’s philosophy attempts to find a balance between Thoreau’s brand of simplicity and also a conscious attempt to consider the beauty of life. To Coperthwaite, beauty takes into account all feelings that something evokes in you. If you have a beautiful object, but know that it’s made by someone labouring in a sweatshop, you’d be hard pressed to find it beautiful. As a homesteader, Coperthwaite is certainly attempting to live a life of voluntary simplicity, but he occasionally surprises with his attempts to cut unnecessary items out of his life to an extent that I hadn’t considered doing myself.

I’m not really sure what all this will mean to me. I think that part of it is a desire to consider how to live a life with less things, and less time spent doing work which serves no purpose other than to maintain some cultural ritual which gives me no benefit, like mowing the lawn when I find tall and wild grasses more beautiful than cut ones. I’d like to keep simplicity in mind as a design criteria for the house that we build at our new homestead. Like Coperthwaite, and unlike Thoreau, I also expect to use beauty as a criteria for my life as well.

For some closing words on this topic, I’ll quote yet another William, William Morris, one of the founders of the Arts and Crafts movement:

“Have nothing in your house that you do not know to be useful, or believe to be beautiful”

Sometime ago (late 2007), when I first decided to try weaving, I got very excited and jumped online and purchased several cones of yarn. I had no idea about yarn count and so what I thought I was getting was totally different from what I actually got. The end result is that I have lots of cones of yarn that I have no idea what to do with.

The brown on the right has a count of 75/1 (100% lambswool woolen spun)

The natural beige in the middle is 120/2 (I have no idea about any other info any more except that it’s wool)

The blue is 2/18 (lamb/angora/ny/cashmere blend)

Then we have the purple 2/28 (again I’m lost as to what the wool composition is for this one)

Olive green 110/2 (100% Merino worsted)

and finally (not in photo) Black 80/2 (once more that’s all I know of it).

I purchased all those thinking that they would all be “2 ply” yarns (except the brown), all the same thickness etc, just like if I went into the craft shop and bought balls of “4 play” knitting yarn. I had no idea about count and how dramatic an effect on the size of the yarn that would be. These yarns aren’t the strongest either for the most part. I recall thinking that the olive green would be really strong because it’s used in military uniforms, it snaps under the slightest tension of single strands. I think I read somewhere that if a piece of yarn, when stretched makes a “thunk” rather then a “ping” sound, it shouldn’t be used as warp, these go “thunk”.

Now the point of this post is that I really want to use these yarns. I want to justify their purchase and create something with them, I just have no idea what or how. Should I give up trying to use them as warp due to being sort of fragile or should I use double strands? If I used something else for the warp, what would I use?

If any fellow weavers out there have any brilliant ideas, please please please let me know.

A few days ago a friend sent me an email about her labour experience, at the end of it she mentioned “so hearing that Kinglake has virtually been wiped from the map and that there are fires in St Andrews and Kangaroo Ground must be difficult”. I had no idea what she was talking about so quickly jumped online to check out The Age newspaper. I quickly discovered that it wasn’t just the area we had once lived next door to that was being devastated but also the area surrounding my parents property, areas I’d grown up in. I called my parents and they tried to reassure us that they were fine, they had everything under control and the fires wouldn’t come near them. It didn’t make us feel any better.

I don’t want to go into the details of the fires and deaths, it’s too hard and I keep crying and feeling useless so instead I want to leave you with a photo a friend posted on her LJ that I’ve just found very poignant. Koala’s are not friendly cuddly animals, they are shy, they sleep during the day and they have very sharp claws and will protect themselves if necessary. 

There has been so much death and destruction, humans and animals have lost their homes and lives, and most of a result of certain individuals who think fire is fun or pretty or are just simply sick and twisted individuals. 

There are loads of ways you can help if you wish, many more options if you are actually in Australia but even if your not and you want to help you can buy items from the Etsy Oz Bushfire Appeal. All items have been donated to the appeal and so far they have raised over $2000 AUD to help.

Tracey and I have been working on a little project as part of our local Transition Town group for mapping local food. We were at our local Swanson Market a couple of weeks ago with the big map that we’ve been working on.

The map we’ve built is a two-and-a-half meter long terrain model of the area we live in, showing about half of Waitakere. It was built up with layers of fibre board and cardboard, using terrain maps projected from google maps, then traced and cut out. It’s in four parts, with sides to protect the map, which bolt together and sit on a display table.

We could have just used a big paper map on a pin-up board, but the having such a large and impressive looking model is a great conversation starter. When we take it to a market people come up to us and take a look. Then we tell them that we’re putting pins in the map for anyone who grows veggies, even for their own use, or sells local food, makes local food products, or provides garden instruction or tools.

Instead of trying to promote food growing, we’re asking people about what they are already doing. This sort of conversation is much less confronting for people (we aren’t trying to sell anything), and it has real benefits. In one day we collected information for about 40 local growers, and we’ll be visiting the Oratia Farmers Market this Saturday to collect more. Each pin on the map represents a real local resource, and also potentially the start of a conversation about local resilience.

A physical map has lots of benefits compared to some online tool, but it can only be in one place at a time, so we have an online tool as well. When we get home from the market, the information on each “map pin” gets typed up, and appears on this interactive map:

http://maps.transitiontowns.org.nz/regions/waitakere

The software that runs this can be used by anyone wanting to run a similar project. Contact me if you’re keen to try it in your area.

I’ve finally finished the baby blanket I started back in November, pics:

As you can see the yarns aren’t exactly the same WPI, the pink is a little fluffier so it stands out more. I was hopping that after “fulling” it might even out a little but it looks exactly the same, which is fine because I still love it.

I ended up cutting it off the loom earlier then I had originally planned as the warp threads were really starting to give up the challenge and it had reached a length I was happy with. Final measurements are 123 cm, not including fringe (stared at 220cm under tension) x 74 cm (started at 81 cm in reed).

I’m pretty pleased with myself actually. This is my first finished item, warped and woven by me on my 4-shaft floor loom. I’ve learnt a few things from this project, such as taking my time is a good thing, don’t ever use yarn like this again as it’s too fragile for warp really. There are a few alterations I’d like to make to my loom, I’d like to add 2 more treadles and I’d like to get rid of the current tensioning system with it’s huge heavy box and lead weights and move to a simpler auto tensioning system. I’d also really, really, really, like to get sectional beam & tension box for future projects.

I’m extremely frustrated though living in NZ as a new weaver, getting my hands on weaving tools, accessories and even yarns is turning into loads of trouble. I so wish I had a good weaving supplies store that I could walk into and finger their yarns and pick up their tools and really be able to get my sensory information before making purchasing decisions. I’d also really like to be able to talk to people in a shop who weave, rather then the few “craft” or “knitting” shops that just happen to sell Ashford weaving items. Anyways, I do have some rug warp arriving (hopefully) soon as well as some sample cards of yarn so that I can get to planning and weaving up a few more items prior to Sprocket arriving (17 weeks to go!)

We’ve been steadily harvesting food from the gardens, mostly tomatoes and zucchini’s but some greens as well, a few more potatoes, a few peas and beans. The first batch of corn has finished up and the second batch is starting to ripen as we speak. We had to buy-in more seedlings as our seed raising efforts came to naught really, we ended up with seedling trays of weeds for the most part. Part of the problem has been that our glass house has simply been too hot for the seeds to germinate, however, Craig’s parents were here last week (more on this later) and discovered that the glass house actually had roof vents. Ian has fixed them so that we can now open and close them at leisure so our next batch of seedlings should be much happier.

We planted some more silverbeet (Heritage Rainbow & NZ favorite), perpetual spinach, sprouting broccoli, cabbage palm (which I’d picked up by mistake meaning to get cauliflower), rocket and leeks. So our winter brassicas are off to a good start, just so long as we can remember to consecutively sew more of them to cover our winter needs.

But now to the craft

Buffie and I spent a lovely afternoon the other week dyeing some lemon yellow yarn I’d purchased lovely bright colours (pastel’s for Sprocket are a big no-no around these parts).  First we pre-soaked the yarn in cold water with a little soap so that it would absorb the dye more readily.

We used Ashford dyes made up to the instructions and painted them on to the yarn, making sure the dye went right through to the other side.

 Buffie’s rather the creative sort. 

I quite liked the effect of the “bleed” areas and hopped that the yarn would stay with that faded area, it didn’t really work that way though.

In this one there is black and green next to each other, unfortunately the green is REALLY dark and just looks black.

After painting we wrapped the yarn in glad-wrap:

Then we left them out in the hot sun to bake for the rest of the day (this was a little trick I learnt from my friend Rochana, much nicer then all the other boiling and microwave methods I’ve heard of, especially when you can’t use the microwave for food anymore).

After baking I washed out the excess dye and hung the skeins out to dry. It was just amazing to see the yarns spread out and finished like this. Buffie’s spotted one just looked so cool.

Then the final step was to pop the skeins on the swift and wind them back into balls ready to knit. Buffie’s 2 balls (the one on the left was the spots):

And mine:

 

The resulting dye colours were quite a bit darker then we had imagined and we certainly wouldn’t have called the colours “purple” or “turquoise”. We did discover that the “turquoise” and the “purple” when mixed (noted from bleed areas) make a lovely purple colour. I’m going to dye up another couple of balls with the remainder dye to match my first ball (the one on the right) and knit it into a lovely baby’s hoodie from a pattern called Nikau created by my friend Justin Turner (who makes lovely baby patterns) that you can purchase here at her website.

The Nikau

 

Nikau pattern

So far I’ve knitted most of the back