Choosing Fabrics And Colors
plus some lip balm math

I have been going through my fabric for reupholstering choices. I don't have enough of any wool besides this pretty orange to recover my couch. This (as some of you may remember) was supposed to be my new winter coat. That never got made. Sometimes you have to make some hard choices like- do I pay my electricity bill so it doesn't get turned off today or do I pay my mortgage...do I recover my couch in my winter coat fabric so I won't be depressed sitting in my living room or get depressed making a cute coat that I'm too big to look cute in?

Seems impossible to decide sometimes. However, I can probably make a winter coat out of some of the other wool I found. The flower fabric is what I'm thinking about using for the arm chair. It does occur to me that it may give a slightly British chintzy look to my living room but it matches the orange for the couch perfectly. I will have to investigate my stores of fabric just a little more. Most of the fabric I buy is suitable for aprons and quilts and cute projects and not really for a big armchair.

If I use the orange for the couch I think I'll be using the "fern shoot" green for the walls as we did in our last living room. I had finally decided on an antique yellow color but I don't want lots of orange with yellow. Orange with green is much nicer I think. Mixing cool with warm. Balance.

Meanwhile our main computer has a virus. So I'm doing everything on the laptop. Not particularly ideal. But it makes one terribly thankful to have a laptop at all at a time like this. I'm wondering if I should have Philip install InDesign on this dinky machine and work on the magazine from it or wait until the main computer is cleaned up? I'm afraid my magazine launch keeps getting pushed to later and later. I hope you'll all still be interested if it takes another couple of months to get the first one out. I bet most of you don't even think I'll do it. I don't blame you. Personally I think it was a little over enthusiastic to think I could produce something in one month using a program I don't understand.

I have today off. Having at least one day a week off from work is pretty nice. I could get used to this. I can do whatever I want!

What I'm working on right now is making lip balm. I am also preparing oils for using in solid deodorant. If you want to learn how to make both I'm definitely going to tell you here eventually. What you should be doing is saving your used up lip balm tubes and tins, clean them out using the tip of a knife, then a q-tip and/or a paper towel. If you feel more comfortable disinfecting them before using again- wipe them down with rubbing alcohol. For the deodorant, save your tubes because you can use them for your home made version, clean out the residue in the same way you do with the lip balm tubes. This way you don't have to buy containers for this project and you keep some plastic out of the landfill a little longer.

I've been saving up lip balm tubes for a while. I think I've mentioned here before that I go into a full panic attack if I go anywhere without a tube of it. I have a tube of lip balm on me at all times. And OF COURSE I'm very picky about what lip balm I use. I don't like it to be too slick. I don't like the slick sensation (which is why I hate it when magazines say punchy little things like "...with a slick of lipstick on her lips..." Dude. Gross.) The perfect lip balm is the regular Burt's Bees lip balm. It's usually $2.79 a tube around here. I buy lip balm fairly often. I mean every couple of months I buy a couple of tubes. That may not seem like much but think about it: I spend about $16.74 a year on lip balm. That means I also toss out at least six tubes of it a year.

I know what you're thinking: that is so insignificant it doesn't matter.

You're wrong. (if that's what you were actually thinking)

Just think: If only half of the US population uses lip balm (150 million people) and each of them only used and tossed out one tube of lip balm a year, that means that every year 150 million plastic lip balm tubes get tossed onto the landfills every year. But then you have to multiply that number by the probable number of years we're all tossing empty lip balm containers in the garbage, most of us are lucky and get to be adults for at least twenty years. Twenty years have already gone by that I have been using up lip balm and throwing the empties away.

That means that I have already thrown away 120 tubes of lip balm and spent approximately $334 dollars on that product. See how such a tiny little thing can add up?

So if even half of the adults who use lip balm in this country live as long as I have so far there have been about 180 million plastic tubes of lip balm tossed onto the landfills.

I'm being conservative on purpose. Most people who use lip balm probably use more than one tube a year. Can you imagine what 150 million tubes of used up plastic lip balm containers looks like in one heap? Huge. That's how the little things add up. Fast. It's not just you in this country doing whatever you're doing. There are about 305 million people in the United States. So whatever you're using up is being used up by millions of other people too.

But I can't control what other people do. Maybe my desire to reuse lip balm and deodorant containers and make my own sounds insignificant, but every tube of lip balm I don't throw on the heap is one less thing that will take a million years to decompose.

The thing is, it's cheap and easy to make your own lip balm. Obviously that's what I'm going to show you. It's not complicated and doesn't take much time. Plus, you get to have complete control of what goes into it and what it tastes like. It's also cheaper than buying it. I promise, it's cheaper.

Math is so cool.

Urban Homesteading
(an unexpected discourse)

This is the tidy way we recycle our things. Yamhill County is really behind the eight ball when it comes to their recycling program...only plastic that is a "bottle" may be recycled which means that things like yogurt containers cannot be recycled. They also won't pick up glass. While this is all true, I am only telling you so you will be distracted from the evidence that we rarely take our recycling to the outside bin unless it's threatening to get up and crawl away on it's own.

Yes, that is a night time commode you see there. We still have all the post surgery gear needed to help my mom recover. The garage is unbelievably messy. I have begun to organize, to actually make use of empty shelf space in favor of stacking stuff on the floor, and getting ready to make a Good Will run as well as calling for details about two different local-ish E-bay consignment companies. I said it was time to clean up my house and I wasn't kidding.

Holy Moses with Mustard In His Beard...it makes me feel suffocated just looking at this awful mess. It's difficult to navigate the interior of the garage. There will always be a mess in here. I have to be realistic. Philip is an artist and you can't catalog an artist's stuff and keep it eternally tidy...most artists need a certain amount of chaos to spark the creative engine. However, that doesn't mean I can't get everything else all tidied up.

I started working on it yesterday. I had to stop before I wanted to because my back is newly recovered and I don't want to send myself back to bed with a heating pad. So I got started by cleaning up my recycling area. I actually got a nice basket to put in the kitchen for paper, cans, and plastic (bottles). This way we can easily whisk it to the big bin outside when it gets full. I got it months ago and never put it to use. Totally typical of me.

I also unpacked all of my herbs and salts and other witchy things and put them back on the green shelving unit we used to have in the store that makes Capello swoon and want to rub things on her naked body. It's my mini apothecary shop in the garage. I always wanted some cool herbal center of activity. Herbs need to be kept in a dark place in order to maintain their quality. My garage is generally pretty dark, even with the lights on. It also stays cooler than any other spot in the house which is also good. When I have completed organizing my pantry and garage, I will be able to post a few herbal how-tos...right in time for the holidays.

Urban homesteading isn't just about gardening and preserving food, it's about all the small things you can make for yourself. All the things we have grown accustomed to letting other people make for us: cleaning supplies, soaps, small building projects (or large), sewing household goods, sewing clothes, making medicines**, beauty products like shampoos and lotions, keeping hens, and rediscovering resourcefulness. It's important to remember that anyone can be a part of urban homesteading.

The point of it is that you can try your hand at any of those things and what doesn't work for you, don't do. Every little thing that does work for you, that you can incorporate into your urban or suburban existence, is a little inch of personal freedom regained from the corporate commercial America. The freedom to have soaps without perfumes, or soaps with only natural ingredients. The freedom to eat food that is organic and picked at the peak of ripeness rather than ripened with gases in a warehouse. You have the freedom to make clothes that fit you and suit your style better than you can find out there in the stores. You can buy all those things, but when you make them yourself you have the ultimate power over your own life and often it is cheaper when you do it yourself.

The best part about it is the pleasure it affords you in navigating life's necessary details. The first time I built something, (our first chicken coop), left me giddy with pride. It was pretty wonky and not exactly the kind of artisan work you would show a contractor, but I made it from scratch for pretty cheap. I learned to make a door and use a circular saw. It was so much fun! Even though quilting has become respected as an art, it is actually one of the most important urban homesteading skills...to make blankets to keep ourselves warm. First and foremost, a quilt is a practical item.

What happens when people make a lot of their own things is that they can't help but play with design and color and style. Women had to make quilts for their families, but why not make a pattern from your scraps? When you take a hand in making things for yourself what happens is that you create the most personal world for yourself. No one will have the same quilt, the same wonky (but rainproof) chicken coop, the same shirt made from an old pretty sheet, or the same recipe for canned pears.

There are few things as beautiful as people reclaiming their independence from others. Americans are always shouting out about their freedoms, their choices, their INDEPENDENCE. Yet I would wager that Americans are more dependent on commerce than any other nation in the world. We go to Walmart. Don't know how to make macaroni and cheese from scratch. Don't know how to kill a chicken (I don't.). We need Safeway to sell us our tortillas and cheese and China to make our clothes and Johnson and Johnson to make our shampoos and lotions and salves.

That's not entirely fair, city people all over the world have lost touch with all of these things. But that's what's great about the urban homesteading movement. People in small city apartments are putting up small batches of jam, making quilts, shopping the farmer's markets, making things for themselves. Every inch you take back is empowerment. Every inch you take back from Walmart and Safeway is strength the corporations are losing in their vice-grip on us.

Some people may find it all a little overwhelming. So, don't try to do everything. Just try to do one thing for yourself this month that you've never done before. Make one thing you usually buy pre-made. Even if you aren't totally happy with the results, chances are you'll have a lot of fun doing it.





*I am a firm believer in using some herbal medicines, but I have come to greatly value modern western medicine as well. No home remedy has ever been able to balance my brain out the way modern psychiatric meds have been able to do and I have tried almost all natural solutions, so I do know the difference. Philip also has serious asthma and there is no way I would ever try to treat that herbally. So I opt for a combination of natural and man-made solutions to health. Nothing can beat comfrey salve for cuts and bruises and I plan to learn to make some and if you want to make some too I'll share what I learn with you here.

Home canned goodness with all the convenience and none of the botulism

It's really wonderful to open up a jar of home canned tomatoes when you're looking for something good to make for dinner and the fridge is slim on vegetable pickings. I made tomale pie using almost exclusively preserved and canned food. While that doesn't actually sound mouth watering, the tomatoes Lisa and I canned turned out great and the flavor is very good, the color bright and cheerful.

A long time ago (this summer) I talked about home canning not being a money saving device, because by the time you put in your seven hundred hours of work doing it, and buy your produce and jars, it's not much cheaper than buying them at the super market. However, there are virtues much more important than cost. Obviously quality is a plus, because when you preserve produce yourself you can control the quality of the food being prepared; you can pick it at its peak rather than when its under ripe and the vitamin content is weak.

In this age of rethinking the use we put our resources to, and trying to figure out how to reuse as much as we can to reduce landfill mass and maximize the life of the materials we produce, canning food at home makes a lot of sense. I think about this as I open jars of tomatoes and open the cans of beans from Trader Joe's. The jar gets cleaned and stored against next years summer canning. The bean cans get cleaned and put into recycling. While I'm glad I can recycle those cans, the jars will last many seasons of use and reuse before they have to be sent off to be melted down and remade into new jars or glass slippers or whatever. Environmentally speaking, preserving your own food in jars is very smart.

Unfortunately, most people don't think it's fun enough to spend their hard earned free time leaning over steaming hot pots of jam in hundred degree summer weather to commit to canning their own food. I just don't understand it.

In other news, I still can't believe I have a dog. She turns a year old tomorrow. Plus she threw up her breakfast this morning. Poor Chickadee. Dogs are really gross.

I have finished the pot holders yesterday so today I go and get envelopes for packing them up. I better make sure I have everyone's addresses before I go to work. I am optimistic that they will be in the post by this afternoon. Yahoo!

Lastly: I have found out that this is the "national de-lurking day", invented by grumpy bloggers to inspire all of you quiet lurkers to speak up for yourself and let us know you stopped by. Think of it like this: reading blogs regularly and never ever saying hello is a little bit like ringing someone's doorbell and then running away. I know a lot of my friends read my blog from time to time (because they tell me they do) but almost none of them leave comments. Except for Lucille. (And a few of you have left a rare comment, which I have to tell you always makes my day!) Considering how far away most of my friends and family are, hearing from you in such a casual way gives me the sensation that you are not all that far from me in spite of the miles of road between us.

Having said that, I very much enjoy conversing over the blog fences with other bloggers who do drop in and say hello. So I'm not going to spend another moment sounding like a needy-whiney-ungrateful-ho-bag. From here on out I am zen-master-of-calm-nonchalance.

I've done yoga a few times in my life and somehow, in spite of how this isn't supposed to be possible, I've injured myself twice doing it. I was thinking about how I should probably become a yoga-master-chai-drinking-super-calm-meditative person. But I just wonder if the fact that I have hurt myself twice in the persuit of zen-type exercise is a sign that I am not cut out for that kind of thing. I am trying to figure out what kind of exercise I can do that won't exacerbate my back and hip problems while helping me to strengthen my core and tone my muscles so that one day, when they are not encased in a thick layer of insulation they will not hang down like elephant knees.

I usually use my ellyptical machine for cardiovascular exercise. Plus I ride my bike to work (which isn't saying much since I only live fifteen blocks from the store.) And sometimes I walk the dog. Everything that requires me to bear down on my hip makes it hurt at least a little. Like everything I've just mentioned above.

My other choices for fitness are:
pilates (whatever that entails?)
yoga (provided I avoid spraining my wrist and ankles again)
limited weight lifting (arms only, no back straining deal)
fit ball exercises

All those other hip methods of fitness are not appropriate (or are too expensive). No martial arts, no jogging, no boxing, no boot camp, and certainly no pole dancing. Pole dancing might not be hard on my joints, back, and hips, but I just have zero desire to bust out stripper moves.

Lordy Lou, I sure do sound ancient. (Maybe I should start taking Ensure and buy stock in Depends. I just might beat my mom to the body-breakdown-punch. Pam Kitty Morning suggested becoming friends with Allieve. Is it time to abandon my Advil crutch?

Here's my last thought before I go tackle the work load for the day: It occurs to me to wonder if I would be nearly so creaky at this tender age of 37 if I had been a teen mom? I'm not necessarily saying I support teen motherhood, but there just might be a super good physiological reason women can have children so young. (Well, when our lifespans were about thirty five years it's obvious that the procreating better start early. Even though we live so much longer now, our bodies haven't exactly evolved to meet up with older motherhood.) Your back is much more supple when you're 17 years old than it is when you're 30. I didn't start having back problems until I put it out one day picking Max up recklessly fast and unmindfully. If you have your babies by the time you're twenty, they're too big to pick up by the time your body starts its dark descent into hell.

But honestly, I don't mind this aging process.


*Once again I must point out that the spell check option has gone back to its usual trick of not working. I tried. It bugs me almost as much as it bugs you.

If only I had my own magazine...

Philip gave me these books for my birthday/anniversary presents. The MaryJane's Idea Book is very cool. It's like her magazine times ten. I will admit that I feel a little inferior when I read about her life and projects. I mean, here's a middle aged woman who is not chubby, completely lovely, has created an amazing little lucrative empire for herself, and is not a beer-swilling weak-backed crazy person who can barely ever remember to order new checks before she runs out. Everything she does seems so frugal, so wise, so moderate, and annoyingly healthy.

The Re-creative book is pretty cool. I am inspired lately by all the recycled crafts going on out there. In some ways it's silly to have a book with fifty projects that completely depend on you finding the same throw-away items as the designers did, they're making things out of trash and repurposing things that most people will not have, like New York metro cards. On the other hand, what all these books are doing is inspiring (or trying to inspire) people to think differently about things they might throw away, or things that others might throw away. This is valuable to us all. It is so lazy to look at everything as fulfilling one purpose when it might find new life as a whole new useful object. I am trying to think like that myself.

I have been doing that for years to a certain extent. I never seemed to have a ready stock of wrapping paper in my house so I have wrapped presents in some very interesting ways using newspaper and construction paper. I remember wrapping one wedding present with Newspaper and then covering it in three dimensional spirals I cut out of construction paper. It wasn't the tiniest bit elegant, but it made me laugh and you can bet that no other present looked like that. The present was a pair of pot holders I'd made the couple. One in black because the bride was a very fashionable gal who was into black and white. It was the single most personal wedding gift I have ever made and wrapped. I wish I'd taken photos of it.

We've had this lamp for a long time and the shade is now in a very sad state. I was thinking of buying a new shade but now I am inspired to either use fabric I already have or use some other material. I won't get to it any time soon because of that super long list I have hanging over my head (from which things are actually getting ticked off, in spite of the back incident). But I'm thinking that this lamp will be an exercise for me in using only things I already have. When I finally come up with a new shade, I'll post the results.

I have now completely gone through all of my magazines and sent them to the recycling bin having ripped out all the pages that had inspiring images on them. I have a HUGE binder full of pages I've saved from magazines for the past eighteen years. In truth, I have enough now to fill two giant binders. While I was going through the last of them this week-end while propped up in bed with a heating pad under my back, I couldn't help but indulge in one of my many fantasies that my head has been filled with since I was a small girl. I would love to publish my own glossy magazine.

What could I possibly publish that would improve on the million magazines that are already out there, enough variety to appeal to every lifestyle, every subject, every region, and every religion? I would pull together elements from many of them into one place. A magazine where good writing on important domestic subjects like "Why safety locks don't make you a better mother" and good design come together in one place.

Here's the thing: I read Elle magazine because it's the only fashion magazine that dedicates a lot of space to "Indie" designers, I read Vogue because even though it's kissing the big designers' tired asses, Vogue actually prints really intelligent articles on all kinds of subjects, I like Jane magazine because it doesn't take itself too seriously and is fun to read (even though it's so completely aimed at the nineteen to twenty five year old crowd), and I read ReadyMade for the innovative projects, and I want to read BrainChild because its not afraid to go against the current mothering trends (but I don't often read it because there's no shiny pictures and because I think it could use a bigger dose of irreverence. See what a pop-culture whore I really am?)

If I had my own magazine I would not give an inch of space to fashion designers like Dior, Versace, Balenciaga, or any other stuffy old mogul fashion conglomerates who do the same thing over and over and mostly are designed for really boring socialites to wear. I would only feature Indie deisigners or designers who have some innovative risk taking spirit like Alexander McQueen, Marc Jacobs, and Vivien Westwood.

If I had my own magazine there would be no uber skinny models ever. I would probably end up being labeled a "plus size" magazine for using models that are at least a size 8. Well, go suck lemons on the catwalk people! When I went to design school, the fitting model dress size was eight. That was in 1987. It's not completely a case of models and people getting more and more insanely skinny, a little vanity sizing has been slowly applied to clothes. A size 8 in 1987 is probably the equivalent of a size 4 today. People sure are emotional about numbers, and kind of stupid to buy the whole vanity sizing thing. Anyway, I would not allow models in my magazine whose knees are larger in circumferance to their thighs. That's just sick and gross.

If I had my own magazine I would have articles in it that questioned everything. Such as the current trends in parenting that have parents thinking they've signed a contract with the devil if they don't spend every second of every day with their child and protect their child from every unpretty fact of life until they're eighteen years old. (At which point they will enter the "real" world where they will not be equipped to deal with anything at all and will probably end up overdosing on heroine.) I would have articles about keeping house that are inspiring without pandering to the notion that all of our homes should be free of dust or else people will think bad things about us. In my magazine, readers would be invited to have fun cleaning their homes without worrying that they are filthy monsters if they only do it twice a month.

If I had my own magazine I would feature artists and craftspeople who are making truly equisite things. No precious moments style paintings of alien-eyed children with impossibly big heads covered in suger sweetness. There would be interviews that examined the creative process of different artists, crafts people, musicians, and writers, because don't all of us want to know what other people do to keep in the creative groove? You don't? Well then you better not read my damn magazine! I would have a featured project in every issue too. A pattern or instructions for something really cool.

So watch out, when I finish my never ending huge list of things to do to get people shopping on my web store, coming into my retail store, and stocking their own stores with the things I design myself, I will kick the publishing world's ass!

Do you think I'll beat Beyonce to the magazine stands? You know, she probably has her own magazine in the works too. Mine will be better.


*Either the spell check feature isn't working, like in the old Blogger days, or I didn't make any errors, which is impossible. So don't hold this against me please.