Deep Craft – Page 61 – Ethos of Making

The Week in Bloom

This week I asked my friend Colby Eierman (above) to report on the Week in Bloom from Benziger Family Winery in Glen Ellen CA, giving us a glimpse of a micro climate just 20 miles to the East; all text and images that follow are by Colby (if you would like to report on ‘The Week in Bloom’ from your neck of the woods, please fill out the PARTICIPATE form and send a note):

This week could be considered the season opener for gardeners, as our official frost free date is April 15th.Â Of course every garden is different, but it is pretty safe to say that most of us are now free to plant tender annuals.Â This also turns out to be a tough week to choose only a few highlights for â€œThe Week in Bloomâ€.Â Here are a few choice selections from this valley, hanging at about 800 ft. above sea level on the east side of Sonoma Mountain, that we call Benziger Family Winery. Continue reading “The Week in Bloom”

Missing Stories

Sometimes I think of Art as involving missing stories, requiring more work to assemble a narrative in lieu of functionality (the domain of handicraft).

I was thinking about these ‘missing stories’ as I swept around a handmade steamer trunk we found years ago at a garage sale in Oakland. Obviously a production of necessity, the trunk was made for the singular voyage from Havre to New York about 100 years ago. The box has been in the basement of a bungalow most of the time since, but invites speculationÂ into its past simply because it has survived in tact while there is no sign of the goods it carried in the first place.

Art reduces the boundaries between work and thought. Traditional craft makes the distinction obsolete; both art and handicraft are most robust when the two are fused.

The Week in Bloom

Wild plum tree cluster (Prunus americana) in a grazing meadow

We’re taking the week off, spring cleaning and preparing for family to arrive from the East Coast. I’ve been cycling along low lying ranches in the fog belt of the Estero Americano watershed, scouting roadside willow, which thrives in the perpetually moist culverts. The grazing meadows are at their most lush, with occasional fruit trees just beginning to bloom, about a month later than in sunnier spots at higher elevations.

Wild plum (Prunus americana)

Marsh pea (Lathyrus palustris) in the culvert

Horsetail or (Equisetum arvense). According to my friend Colby Eierman (who identified this) of Benziger Family Winery, “We make both a fermented and a hot brewed tea from it.Â The latter is a good tool against fungal disease.”

WisteriaÂ (Wisteria frutescens) is at its peak back in town.

The Gopher Guy

Gregg Crawford, aka The Gopher Guy, at Harmony Farm Supply

Just like anyone with open land in West Sonoma County, we have a gopher problem. We have been able to keep them out of our kitchen garden’s raised beds by lining their interiors with 1/2″ galvanized hardware cloth, but have plans to cultivate a 1/2 acre meadow, and the gophers are the first hurdle to realizing our dream of truly living off the land. With the end of the major rains and subsequent new growth, the gophers are at their most active and I’m readying to try my hand as a trapper. Today I had the great fortune to attend a seminar at Harmony Farm Supply led by Gregg Crawford, The Gopher Guy, who has earned an international reputation as a trapper of invasive gophers, moles and voles.

100 year old gopher trap design, which The Gopher Guy has improved

I was impressed with The Gopher Guy beyond his being a valuable resource for my task at hand. Gregg isÂ a cunning and competent trapper, with a deep understanding of the animals he traps, and he takes great care to emphasize the non-toxic/non-invasive benefits of his approach, which is easily the ‘greenest’ method. But what impressed me most is that he has designed and made his own tools, with patents pending on some. He modified a 100 year old trap design and has it manufactured under his name/brand; he turns his own ‘pokers’ from old baseball bats; he fashions his own sheet metal components including a folding trap door inspired by a design he saw when he fought in Vietnam. In order to work swiftly and efficiently from a kneeling position, he prefers using an Irish made, forged steel spade, a Jackson J-450 Series, which he modifies by sawing the handle short and sharpening the wooden tip to a point. The heavy spade allows for quick cutting in soft soil and he uses the pointed handle to ream the gopher hole to the appropriate diameter to insert the trap, without changing position.

The Gopher Guy’s custom tools; pokers and diggers, patent pending

Le Forgeron

Most villages in the Bassar region of Togo, West Africa, still had a blacksmith when Ene and I lived there briefly about 20 years ago. Our friend, Innocent (above) was Le Forgeron de Guerrin-Kouka, the market town where we lived. Although iron smelting had been in steady decline since Colonial times, it was still practiced in remote areas that had not already been devastated by deforestation. Contemporary blacksmiths like Innocent relied mostly on pot metal and rebar for their supply, although they still used wood charcoal to fire their furnaces. I was working as part of a broader reforestation effort at the time, but did not realize the extent to which iron smelting was responsible. Since the Middle Ages, vast forests have been converted to coal throughout West Africa, especially in the Bassar region, famous for its iron rich ore.

Tools Making Tools

One of the cool things about craft production is that it does not respond to markets so much as do away with them altogether- supply and demand are localized in both space and time. When in the service of self-sufficiency, production is not only localized but scaled in response to some form of human power. Taken to the extreme, making anything begins with tools making tools, with the added requirement of self-replicability.

I have a small library of books on self-sufficient living and have been studying Build Your Own Shop From Scrap: The Charcoal Foundry (self published, Springfield, MO, 1980), written and illustrated by David J. Gingery. The book is folksy but practical and highly instructive, and has me seriously considering building a foundry and making my own woodworking tools. I’m particularly drawn to the 19th century foundry model described by the author, epitomized by the long defunct Maramec Ironworks of St. James Missouri. Like all pre-industrial foundries, the Ironworks smelted their own locally mined ore with charcoal from local timber, and powered their leather bellows with a water wheel.

Here is the book’s Introduction:

“The more than 20 years of research and experimentation that precedes this group of manuals was inspired by a statement by someone I’ve long forgotten: ‘The metal lathe is the only machine in the shop that can duplicate itself or any other machine in the shop.’ It followed then: If you have a lathe you can produce the rest of the needed equipment to make up a fully equipped machine shop.

Of course my first problem was that I didn’t have the lathe. As is usually the case with the hobbyist, experimenter or inventor, I didn’t need a machine shop, I just wanted one. There was no way to justify the cost of the commercially made equipment so I set out to build my own.

The theme of the idea is remarkably like the recipe of someones grandmother for chicken soup, which begins, ‘First you get a chicken.’ Well, if you want to make chicken soup you’ll have to buy a chicken. Or, lacking the necessary funds, you might steal one. You can’t make a chicken, but you can build your own lathe, and with it you can produce the rest of the equipment to make up a full and practical machine shop.”

Interview with Caroline Woolard

I’m continuing to feature an ongoing series of interviews and studio visits with other makers/artisans/crafters. If you would like to introduce yourself and your work to a growing Deep Craft network, I invite you to visit the PARTICIPATE page of this site. Meanwhile, allow me to introduce you to artist/provocateur Caroline Woolard.

DC: Describe what you do as a maker/artisan.
CW: As a maker, I share small discoveries with other people, stirring up curiosity and optimism. These moments defy expectations and can come from material properties or experiences of the commons.Â Lately, I am working on a barter/skill-sharing network for artists: www.OurGoods.org Continue reading “Interview with Caroline Woolard”