Twenty some years ago, not too long after I bought my little homestead I was fully engaged in a project to raise the roof on what was the first metals studio here, now known as the old metals studio and becoming known as the wood shed. I had a rust bucket contraption of a mini pick up truck and was loading asphalt shingles into the back of it at the home improvement store. With just a few more packages left on the cart to transfer over one of those bend, lift, twist movements resulted in crippling back pain. “Is this what people mean when they throw their back out,” I wondered? It seemed to take a herculean effort to stand up fully and then still somehow manage to get the remaining shingles in the truck and drive home.
Continue reading “Trigger Point Therapy: a surprisingly effective, cheap, easy, drug free way to deal with most pain”Month: July 2019
A Gathering of Reference Links for my Students
This post is going to be another one of limited interest to most. This past weekend I taught a vessel chasing workshop to a fabulous group of students. During the course of it we were talking about so many items and where to find them that it seemed like it would be a good idea to assemble a post which gathers much of that information together in one place for easy future reference. I expect this post will be useful for all future classes as well and will try to keep it up to date. If you are a metalsmith you might find some of this information useful even if you haven’t taken any of my workshops.
Continue reading “A Gathering of Reference Links for my Students”Excellent Perennial Vegetables You Can’t Buy in Stores
I’ve written before about my project to look to sourcing my food directly from my homestead first. Today I thought I’d share just a bit of what that practically means with a bit about two fantastic perennial vegetables that tend to get ignored by most despite how awesome they are. They both provide an abundant supply of highly edible produce over a wide range of the growing season. As perennials once established you don’t need to do much of anything to maintain them. I don’t even weed around them. They seem to grow in natural polycultures just fine, thus they promote the building of topsoil instead of its depletion. Pollinators love them so in growing these you support the insect populations so critical to our ecosystems. One is extremely beautiful, generally used as an ornamental. The other is super fragrant, in a good way I might add. Oh, and they both taste great too. To the best of my knowledge though, you can’t buy these in stores, or at the farmers market. There’s a decent chance however, that they are growing near you, if not in your own yard.
Continue reading “Excellent Perennial Vegetables You Can’t Buy in Stores”15 Piece Chasing Tool Set
This will probably not be an exciting post for most people. For the vessel chasing workshops I occasionally teach I make a minimal set of 15 chasing tools for each student to use during class. If they’d like to buy it afterward they can. Not all sets get purchased and so I sometimes have them available for anyone to purchase. However, I need a place I can direct interested people so they can see what’s in the set. That’s what this post is going to be, a reference point for information about the tools. If you are interested in chasing work you might get something out of this as I’ll be describing what I generally use each tool for.
Continue reading “15 Piece Chasing Tool Set”