Everything Must Go Part 4: How to Fold Your Clothes

January 15, 2015

...may seem a little extreme, but this simple change in behavior seems to be making all the difference in our dresser drawers. Very simply, KonMari politely insists (while flicking her pink glitter cat o’ nine tails) that we shape our all of our foldables into neat rectangular packets and stand them cheek-by-jowl in our drawers, rather like file folders in a standing file. As someone who has always folded clothes into squarish shapes and stacked the...

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Get Baking and Share the Loaves

Mr. Homegrown

August 7, 2014

Bread, Food

10 Comments

...oll, answering questions and sharing his knowledge. Baker’s love for bread making is infectious. Catch that infection and you’ll go down a very deep and geeky vortex of hydration ratios and cold proofing sessions. At a panel discussion on Monday, moderated by KCRW’s Evan Kleiman, Baker announced that he’s working on an Einkorn baguette, the bread geek equivalent of proposing a new route up K2 sans oxygen. At both events he dropped a lot of advice...

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FlicFloc Flak

Mr. Homegrown

January 26, 2015

Food, Wheat

11 Comments

...he FlicFloc. A cheap cracker is fine for cracking corn for chicken feed or making a course grind of rye for a Scandinavian style bread, but it does not make either flour or truly flaked grains. The FlicFloc flakes oats and cracks wheat and rye and it’s easy to clean. I’ve never regretted paying more for a tool that will last a lifetime. I have regretted, many times, buying cheap tools. The FlicFloc broke my Grape Nuts addiction. It will pay for it...

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Will 3D Printing Save Us From Bad Garden Sculpture?

Mr. Homegrown

February 13, 2015

Gardening, Thoughtstylings

2 Comments

...s are plagued with bronze, smiling, hyper-realistic statuary. For me these things evoke a visceral uncanny valley horror response. Perhaps 3D printing is the answer. In 2012 artist Oliver Laric approached a museum in the UK and proposed scanning objects from their collection and making the files available for free. You can see those scans, which include Dante, Roman and medieval objects and a few 19th century British mayors here. You can also see...

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A ceramic oil lamp

Mrs. Homegrown

March 4, 2015

Domesticus

15 Comments

...much, I made a little seashell oil lamp the very first project in our book Making It. As a child of the electric age it continuously amazes me that I can make light so easily with cooking oil. Also, in reproducing these lights, I feel a connection to history. I’ve no doubt that my ancestors gathered around fish oil lamps in the north and olive oil lamps in the south. To add to their charms, they aren’t based on petroleum–as paraffin tea candles ar...

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