Make Pizza in Your Oven

March 6, 2019

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Er9mRapFzI In addition to sharing a name, Eric of Garden Fork and I seem to exist in some sort of synchronicity vortex. This past Saturday, after I finished teaching a bread class in which I used the same dough to demonstrate how you can make pizza in your oven with a cast iron skillet, I settled down on the couch to catch up with Eric’s YouTube channel. And guess what he was demonstrating? I first learned about t...

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Random Acts of Beauty

Mr. Homegrown

July 16, 2018

Design

9 Comments

...e, above, shows Burges’ extreme commitment to ornament and detail. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oRDD2hfAxAk Lastly, when it comes to screen time, I’ve been thinking about re-watching the films of Andrei Tarkovsky, Stalker, in particular. Like all of Tarkovsky’ work the film is poetic and ambiguous. In Stalker, Tarkovsky addresses two of the issues that keep me up at night: ecological disaster and a culture that has become overly literal minded....

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A Brief History of Secret Drawers

Mr. Homegrown

August 13, 2018

Design

2 Comments

...unkers. A desk, built for King Frederick William II by the Roentgen brothers takes the secret drawer idea to its zenith. This thing has secret drawers within secret drawers within secret drawers, all propelled by a complex mechanical system: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MKikHxKeodA For a more recent expression of the secret drawer trope see this impressive desk by furniture maker Lonnie Bird: The problem, both in the past and now, is that a dec...

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The Wild Yard Project

Mr. Homegrown

August 22, 2018

Garden Design, Gardening, Native Plants

6 Comments

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NG7EJkSIz_c Storyteller and native plant evangelist David Newsom’s Wild Yard Project seeks to transform the lawn wasteland of our built environment. According to the mission statement of the Wild Yard Project, The World Wildlife Fund recently announced that the natural world is losing 10,000 species a year, due largely to habitat loss. At the same time, we here in the United States have displaced over 40 million ac...

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Maplewoodshop: Saving Shop Class

Mr. Homegrown

August 24, 2018

Design, Thoughtstylings

2 Comments

https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=148&v=JDVJS7xDA2E In U.S. schools shop class has been sacrificed to the Moloch of STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Math). Ninety percent of shop classes have been eliminated with the exception of a few robotics programs. The result, ironically, is STEM graduates so out of touch with the physical world that they design things impossible to build. Image: Maplewoodworking Maplewoodshop seeks to r...

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