Monthly Archives: November 2024

My own damned opinion., Stuff

Indifferent Turkey Day!

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Just can’t get in the spirit of over-eating. I bought a tiny turkey breast, expecting my son to show up, but he had Friendsgiving with a former roommate. The guy’s only living relative, his mom, died recently, so he had nowhere to go.

The usual holiday meal didn’t take place because my youngest granddaughter’s mom and sister have whopping cough. So the big dinner at her Oma’s was cancelled. That’s where we usually get together, but I really don’t think anyone was in the mood.

In crafting news, I’ve been writing up class offerings for next year. I’m going to offer my introductory bookbinding class again, as well as another binding class for binding single sheets into a bound volume. That will include a Japanese stab stitch type book, an accordion spine album, and a glue bound book using a glue gun, glue sicks and an iron. Other bookbinding classes will focus making mini books, junk journals, and zines.

I’ll also be offering a class or two for those who sew on how to read a sewing pattern, including explaining what the symbols mean, fabric selection, fabric grain, as well as thread selection, and how to adjust a pattern to fit. I’ve also had members ask for sewing lessons so I will consider a class or two for whomever is interested.

Soap making and paper making will also be offered again. I plan to ask other members if they have something to teach as well. In the past, there has been a class in paper marbling, a session on gelatin printing, and various sessions of origami, fabric flower making, and card making. These were all offered by members of the maker space.

The classes listed here are just the ones offered in the Craft Area which is the area of the space I am in charge of. Other areas of the space offer classes in various aspects of ceramics, laser cutter use, welding, wood turning, decorative wood burning, jewelry making, stained glass, fused glass, and many more.

As an organization, we offer many of our classes and workshops to members of the public and work with a couple of area schools to offer classes to their students as part of their curriculum. We are completely volunteer run. We’ve been in existence for ten years and have grown from two people sitting in the library talking about making things to over 680 members.

Crafting

So here we are.

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My taxes for this year are going to be fun. The year is not over yet but I’ve supplemented my income with an assortment of classes at the maker space which means an extra 1099 tax form this year and a bit of additional tax. I haven’t participated in any sales or sold anything this year so I don’t have sales tax to pay. I will probably still have to file a form.

But the teaching is fun. I mostly teach members at the maker-space and charge a sum that covers my gas and extra supplies. I say “extra” because I have a lot of supplies and equipment for many different crafts, but occasionally need to buy extra tools.

This year, I have put together bins of supplies for teaching four to six people. For soap making, I have gathered my molds, bases, additives, and tools into a bin that I can just bring up from the basement and take to class. I did the same with the paper-making and book binding supplies.

I’m planning on teaching other book binding classes featuring different types of bindings such as binding single pages and making decorative covers for paperbacks that need repair, and making junk journals, and pop-up books.

Future soap classes will include making hot or cold process soaps, and making utility bars out of the grated and melted bits and scraps of used soap that can be used for cleaning such as the bars I use in the basement and garage for cleaning messy hands and paint brushes. In a pinch, the grated soap can be mixed with borax and washing soda to create laundry detergent.

One of my summer classes will be making paper from plants. It will be a multi-day class with the first day dedicated to making pulp by cooking the plant matter. Maybe I can find a way to get some use out of the unkillable mulberry tree. It’s basically a weed.

It can’t get properly removed because it’s in the narrow wilderness zone between my fence and the neighbor’s fence. Both fences were there when I moved in. They are both are properly within our lot lines which leaves a space between them that is not even large enough for a weed whacker.

I call the mulberry unkillable because the utility company contacts me every other year to say they’re coming over to trim the tree because it’s in the utility lines again, and they come and trim it down and it just grows back. One year, they tried to burn it. I came home from work, and the mulberry was cut back and the stump was black with char. The next spring, new branches and leaves grew. Next spring, I’m going to drill some holes with my larger spade bits and fill them with stump killer. Maybe that will work.

My side of the street has weird fencing. The property directly behind me has a six foot chainlink fence that extends across three back yards to the east. My yard is the only yard with double fencing. My fence is three feet tall and as I mentioned above, the space between the fences if so narrow that I can’t just hang over the fence to try cut the mulberry shorter.

The fence next door on the north starts a foot from the end of my fence because during installation, they discovered a buried stump of an old utility pole which probably extended too far down in the ground to be easily removed. So I attached a 12” piece of chicken wire to prevent my dog from escaping. The neighbors installed a gate at the back fence so the kids could retrieve their balls when they went over the fence. Without the fence, the kids would have had to walk past four houses to the corner and go around the corner and between two houses, and then trudge all the way up to the ball and go back around the way they came.

The four houses around the corner have very long, narrow yards. I figured that the kids’ round trip to get a ball that went over the fence would mean walking a bit under 800 feet so the gate was a good thing. Those kids are all grown up now and there is a new family next door. Periodically, I find a basketball in my yard, but the kids don’t come over to retrieve it. They wait until I notice and toss it back over the fence even though they have my permission to come into the yard to get it.

At any rate, if I can harvest enough bark from the tree, I will attempt mulberry paper. It will probably be a lot of work for a tiny number of sheets. I’ll let you know.

Crafting

Friday Tours and Making

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It’s Tour Night at the maker-space. We get most of our members from tours. The problem is not a lot of members want to do tours, not even most of the 33 persons on our Tour Volunteers Slack channel. There are a couple that I understand have occasional Friday night conflicts, but we hold tours every month on a regular schedule. From my point of view, some of the others could step up once in a while.

I get excuses like “I don’t know what to say.” “What if I forget something?” I know they went on an orientation tour which means they walked through the entire space at least once. We have a script that gives the high points and membership information such as how to sign up and what membership costs – stuff they should know from joining.

I mean, not everyone can talk off the top of their head, and I get that. I never had a tour when I first started. I never even got an orientation. That was due to the fact that I showed up every open shop night for two years before I joined. They accepted me as one of them before I paid for membership. The guy who issued my key-fob just typed the number into the database and said, “here you go.” But I can talk up the space without a script and so long as I remember the fees and contact information, I don’t worry about it. I’ve walked through and pointed out equipment saying, “I don’t what it does because I don’t use it, but we have it for those who need to use it.”

We were a lot smaller in numbers then, and our space was a quarter of the size of the space we occupy now. We moved into our new space in 2019. When I joined we had about 75 members in 3400 square feet. By the end of 2019, we had 300 members in 13800 sq. ft.

Covid cost us some members and even though the space was technically closed for part of the pandemic and we lost a few paying members, we managed to pay the rent. Now we have well over 600 members and add a few more every other week. Since we don’t have to sign membership contracts, many of our members join to work on a specific project for a month or more and then drop out.

In 2021, we added an additional 7,800 sq ft. to add some craft areas we hadn’t had room for, such as Ceramics, a CNC router capable of handling full sheets of plywood, screen printing, and a bike repair area. We were able to triple the number of studio spaces we offer, plus maintain a large open area for events such as member art shows, large scale assembly projects, and the occasional Craft sale. We also added a woodworking classroom and project assembly areas.

We’re currently in the planning stages for buying our own space. We have regular planning meetings and have looked at a number of places that are vacant or soon to be vacant. We’re also looking at funding opportunities. We have a bit less than two years left on our lease. The building is for sale, but the upkeep and maintenance of the entire building might be more that we want to pay, plus we would be responsible for finding renters for the vacant half of the building and the problems that would bring.

We’re are volunteer-run and classed as a non-profit education facility since we do teach the use of our equipment and provide opportunities for the members of the community come in to use the facility and take classes. We also have partnerships with a couple of schools to teach students how to make things. We also started a summer makers camp for 6th through 8th grade students who live in the area.

If you’re interested in joining a space like this, search makerspace, maker-space, or even cooperative workshop. You may find one in your area that you can join. There are at least 4 in my area, some of which are specialized for one thing like photography or a group of related interests such as an art workshop for various art forms, or an incubator for the technical minded.

About me, Mostly me

Have you ever looked up and seen your face on someone else?

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I don’t mean did you meet a sibling or a cousin on the street or someplace that you didn’t know was in town. What I mean is have you ever looked into the face of someone and said, “you’re the person people tell me I look like.”

It’s happened to me twice. Once when I was still in high school, I was on the bus, which was unusual for me as I normally walked to save money to buy books. i was on the bus and happened to look up and across from me was a face so similar to mine, I could only stare. She stared back and we both said to each other that people kept saying they knew someone that looked like me.

We went to separate high schools that were down the street from each other. She went to the Catholic school and I attended the public high school. She was a grade behind. The second strange thing was, when we talked about our siblings, one of her brothers knew my youngest brother, but they didn’t look alike.

The third weird thing was she lived around the corner. The street I lived on backed onto the neighbors’ yards, which in turn edged a nature area. The side of the street my parent’s house was on, spanned the length of three blocks because of that undeveloped land. So around the corner wasn’t in close proximity, but her parents’ property also edged up to part of that land around the corner.

We never became friends, but we did talk when we’d meet on the bus which wasn’t often. The only time I rode was when there was heavy rain or snow. We’d talk about classes we had – I had French and German; she had Italian. I was active in Theater and she did other things. I can’t even remember her name.

The second time I saw my face was today. I was on YouTube and a video was in my feed from someone I didn’t follow. When the video loaded, it was like looking in a mirror. I took a screenshot and sent to two friends with the caption “I just saw my face.” They agreed the woman looks a lot like me. I wonder if she’s the girl from the bus from 60 years ago.

Crafting

Introduction to Melt & Pour Soap Making 

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That was the title of a class I gave at the maker space on November 2nd. I had three students attend. Two others had to cancel due to work schedule changes. I plan to offer another introductory class sometime after the holidays. I also had requests for showing how to make soaps with layers, swirls, and embeds.

Finished soaps.
Top to bottom: chocolate mint, oatmeal lavender, cedar & saffron, and lavender dreams

I brought several items for melting the soap base – a crockpot with high-low and warm settings, a single heat setting crockpot, and a wax melter with a digital temperature control. I’ve also used an electric water-filled kettle with a can as an insert to melt soap, but the easiest and fastest to use is the microwave. 30 seconds, stir, another 30 seconds, stir, and repeat until the soap base is melted.

I made a single sample bar of each to show the finished products so my students would know what the bars would look and smell like. I’ve decided that 4 to 6 students make an easy group to teach.

By now, everyone knows the outcome of the election. I’m not going to say anything more than I did my civic duty and voted. Take care, now.