2014: The Year in Review

December 29, 2014

...handheld 2 meter/70 centimeter radio and a rooftop antenna, but I haven’t used it much other than to check in on a local net a few times. I may have to table my amateur radio activities in 2015 in order to focus on other, more pressing, projects. April Easter Lessons Kelly wrote about a troubled project involving dyeing eggs with natural materials. Natural dyes are a subject that interests us both, and I suspect we’ll revisit this topic in 2015....

Read…

Behold the bodkin

Mrs. Homegrown

January 5, 2015

Domesticus

16 Comments

...OED on it, and it is a very English word, but its origins are obscure. It used to refer to several things: a dagger (he himself might his quietus make / With a bare bodkin), a long hair pin, an awl, and the meaning it has retained through today: a needle-like instrument with a blunt knobbed point, having a large (as well as a small) eye, for drawing tape or cord through a hem, loops, etc. It also had another meaning, which is totally fun: transf....

Read…

Everything Must Go: Tidying Up at the Root Simple Compound

Mrs. Homegrown

January 9, 2015

Cleaning, Domesticus, Tidying up

36 Comments

...g so much as playing with those seriously un-fun tile games which children used to get in goodie bags–I dearly hope they’ve become obsolete by now–those little plastic grids of moveable tiles with only one open space which needed to be arranged into some sort of order. At our house, books which could not fit on shelves stood in towers on the floor.The kitchen table had become some sort of horizontal storage depot for everything from bags of whole...

Read…

Everything Must Go Part 3: Clothing

Mrs. Homegrown

January 13, 2015

Cleaning, Domesticus, Tidying up

30 Comments

...attached but just are not you anymore. They relate more to the person you used to be, and we are always changing, after all. Better to let them go free, and find someone else who can love them now, than to doom them to sit in the back of your closet. (This was the most difficult one for me. This round, I finally gave away some of my more fanciful clothing, stuff which related more to my younger self. I gave away my silly hats and opera gloves and...

Read…

Everything Must Go Part 4: How to Fold Your Clothes

Mrs. Homegrown

January 15, 2015

Cleaning, Domesticus, Tidying up

24 Comments

...d arranged in two shoe boxes. It works amazingly well. My underwear drawer used to be the most chaotic of all drawers, and now everything exists in sushi-like tidyness. I am not sharing an image of this with the Internet. You will just have to imagine it. It’s pretty simple. Two shoe boxes, one holding socks, the other holding bras, panties and hankies. Two rows in each box. Let me stop here and talk about the folding itself. When I first read abo...

Read…