Find your place at Spring Bird
If I had a secret weapon in my war to be a creative productive person, it is the mighty pamphlet book! A pamphlet book is a simply stitched book with a soft cover. It’s basically what you would make if you have one of those …
Dyeing with Two Pots For this adventure in dyeing, we got smart and bought a second enamel pot. It’s larger: 5 gallons versus 3. So not only can we cut production time by half, but the larger pot can contain voluminous quantities of plant materials …
Why Use Natural Dyes? My journey with natural dyes began over steaming pots of onion skins and turmeric and with a mysterious flowering vat of indigo. It was about 12 years ago, and I was taking a beginning weaving course at California College of the …
As Summer wanes, I thought it may be fun to soak up some sun by making Cyanotype Prints! This method of “printing” is an easy and striking way to capture your nature collection. This is a great project for kids, but it’s just as fun …
A Reason and Season for Nature School I’ve been hinting and sharing tidbits all Summer about the nature observation project that the kids and I have been practicing. This project emerged from my desire to do better at studying and connecting with the natural world, …
So, I spent most of yesterday morning praying to the Creative Gods for a sign telling me how to better shape my business. Creatively, I am pursuing a lot of different projects, and I think it’s too many directions to market effectively. It’s SUPER hard for me …
Have you ever walked into a Mosquito Cloud? Are these the boys flying in circles while the women mosquitoes go out and get blood? This is what I think about everytime I walk through a particular mosquito cloud that hovers over the path to my …
The kids and I have been practicing being naturalists this Summer. We have found this structure, designed by Claire Leslie in The Nature Connection, to be a useful means for capturing a moment or phenomenon of a day. Since I am obsessed with marking time and …
Well, it was challenging to finish varnishing these benches with all of the rain, and then even more rain prevented us from getting them in the garden! But, today, we finally cleared spaces for them in the forest garden, and now they are part bench-part …
Two years ago Pat started to transform a grassy meadow near the barn into a forest garden. I couldn’t explain it at the time, but I was struggling with our altering the natural environment. (Turns out, it would be the first of many projects that …