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.