Deep Craft – Page 55 – Ethos of Making

The Week in Bloom

“When I first caught sight of it over the braided folds of the Sacramento Valley, I was fifty miles away and afoot, alone and weary. Yet all my blood turned to wine, and I have not been weary since. ivermectin dose for dog scabies “Â -John Muir

At just over 14,000 feet, Mount Shasta is a stratovolcano that is California’s fifth highest peak and the second highest in the Cascade Range. The native inhabitants believed the summit to be occupied by the spirit Skell, and settlers from many cultures have attributed the mountain spiritual power over the past century and a half. My reaction upon approaching Mount Shasta from the old Siskiyou Trail (Highway 5) was like that of John Muir above. ?? ??? ????? I felt magnetically pulled, my eye drawn to its glaciated peaks, the mountain’s silent presence oddly trumping all other thoughts as we spent the weekend visiting our old friend, the architect Kurt Melander, whose cabin sits nestled between two swiftly flowing rivers, in direct view of the southwestern elevation of Mount Shasta.

We discovered the wildflowers to be at their peak as we hiked to the river’s sources, two alpine lakes at about 7200 foot elevation, about three or four miles from Kurt’s cabin, an ascent of just 2000 feet. The day was crystal clear, with a dry, cool breeze coming down from the remaining snow melt, and we all felt the giddy disorientation of the high altitude, pristine beauty around us. ivermectin treats what worms ???? ???? ???? Of the dozens of wildflowers blooming beneath old growth ponderosa pine, mountain hemlock and cedar, here are a few of the more plentiful blossoms growing alongside the rivers: Continue reading “The Week in Bloom”

Sunnyside Menagerie Update

one of three ‘grumpus bumpus’ sculptures, in situ

Our bronze sculptures for the Sunnyside Conservatory in San Francisco have been cast, cleaned up and are ready for patination. We met with the people at Berkeley’s Artworks Foundry the other day to discuss options. I would love to leave the sculptures ‘raw’ and let the bronze gain a natural patina through oxidation, touch and decay/erosion, but the air of San Francisco is very saline and might tarnish the raw metal into verdigris too quickly. During the Rennaissance, bronze sculptures were typically buried to gain an ‘antique patina’, a process intended to imitate the sculpture of ancient Greece and Rome, which were often retrieved from underground or beneath the sea. Patina on bronze is now usually achieved through the application of acids and chemicals, and the options for surface finish are staggeringly numerous. We’ll go with a very natural finish, darkening the recesses and leaving the high spots bright, with no attempt to disguise the material.

‘cakesydillo’ sculpture, ready for patina

Green Walnut Harvest

Ene and Aili harvested hundreds of green walnuts from our tree to make our annual batch of nocino, the homemade digestif we like to share with friends and family on special occasions throughout the year. The nuts peaked about a week later than last year, and we managed to clear the tree of the plump, resinous fruit just before the birds discovered it. ???? ???? It’s wonderful to be home from the East Coast and get back in rhythm with the cycles of our land. This evening I look forward to mowing the meadow.

Aili picking green walnuts _uacct = “UA-4252294-1”; urchinTracker();

Mildred’s Lane Dispatch

David Brooks tests the completed pole lathe at Mildred’s Lane (photo by Walker Tufts)

The Mildred’s Lane Fellows have completed the pole lathe using entirely materials from the land, and are ready to test its performance cutting green wood, split and foraged from recently fallen trees of beech, hickory and white oak. As I have logged on these pages, my long term goal with this project, which I call Deep Craft: Open Source Bioregional Innovation, is to develop a new chair design in the tradition of the Windsor, but that is identified as an icon of Mildred’s Lane. Over the remaining week, David Brooks, Tyler McPhee and other Fellows will experiment with creating simpler products for use on the grounds and indoors as part of the daily routine at Mildred’s Lane. We hope to offer the best of these for sale on these pages in the coming months, and incorporate what we’ve learned in the process in the design of a Mildred’s Lane chair in the future.

leaf of the American Beech (Fagus grandifolia)

To guide their experimentation with the pole lathe, I’m encouraging the students to mimic the contours of the leaves of select species of tree in the shapes of products turned on the pole lathe. Experience has taught me that the morphology of a specific tree is often reflected in how the wood shapes, the wood’s inherent properties tending towards certain patterns of form. ????? ?????????? ??? ???? A candlestick that demonstrates this principle, for example, could be an elegant expression of how Like finds Like.

sketch for the lathe support by David Brooks _uacct = “UA-4252294-1”; urchinTracker();

The Week in Bloom

the nuts of the beech (Fagus grandifolia) are edible

While foraging for materials to build the pole lathe and develop a Mildred’s Lane product, my attention shifted continually from the trees overhead to the ground underfoot. Here is a sampling of some sightings during the course of a morning hike around the property, near the banks of the Delaware River in Northeastern Pennsylvania:

blueberries are ripening in the duff under stands of recently cut white oak

Continue reading “The Week in Bloom”

Mildred’s Lane Dispatch

Mildred’s Lane Fellow, Tyler McPhee, stands by the completed pole lathe ‘motor’

Mildred’s Lane Fellows David Brooks and Tyler McPhee have made impressive progress with the Deep Craft: Bioregional Innovation Project I initiated earlier in the week. Using material culled from the land surrounding Mildred’s Lane, they have constructed the ‘motor’ for a human-powered lathe, consisting of a sprung pole supported by a simple trestle base, lashed together and held in tension with an elegant Spanish windlass. Continue reading “Mildred’s Lane Dispatch”

Mildred’s Lane Dispatch

an indigo bunting ready for James Prosek’s taxidermy workshop

The artist/author James Prosek arrived yesterday morning and led the Mildred’s Lane Fellows in a taxidermy workshop while I surveyed the land for materials. I walked the perimeter of the property’s 90 acres and was pleased to find an abundance of beech and hickory saplings mixed in with mature white oak, pin oak, hemlock and white pine. I chose a site for my pole lathe/bodger’s shack project and recruited a few of the Fellows to begin foraging materials to begin construction.

view of the Delaware from a clearing adjacent to Mildred’s Lane

artist/author James Prosek leads a taxidermy workshop

By the late afternoon we had gathered a collection of Y-shaped branches from fallen white oak and transported them to the site. We felled a straight sapling of shagbark hickory (Carya ovata) about 24′ long, and peeled the bark with a drawknife. This will serve as the pole for the pole lathe, the springy core of the human-powered machine.

a feast of Delaware River eels and cheese smokedÂ by Ray Turner, the Eel Man

Some of the Fellows accompanied James to visit Ray Turner, the Eel Man, who traps and smokes eels from the Delaware upstream from Mildred’s Lane. The crew returned with smoked eels, cheese and mustard for dinner, an appropriate feast and prelude to James’ after dinner lecture entitled ‘Eels‘, the subject of his forthcoming book. The lecture/slide show was fascinating, and we learned that eels migrate from freshwater to saltwater to spawn, hundreds of miles offshore, the babies returning to their native rivers. The Delaware hosts an abundant eel population up its entire length, being one of the few remaining large rivers with no damns to hinder eel migration, enabling Ray Turner to trap the fish in his stone weirs hundreds of miles from the sea.

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