My black locust trees are struggling after the frost we got the other night. Buds in March didn’t bode well for the little guys. My bitternut and shagbark hickory trees are playing it a little safer and haven’t budded yet. Then again, they could be dead, not dormant. Time will tell.
Last week I found an ad on craigslist for 140 board feet of cherry that a lady in Benzonia had from her late father’s furniture building projects. Stephanie and I went to look at it and it was incredible and beautiful dark red. There were several boards that had similar shapes that we could tell they all came from the exact same tree. We bought it all and have it stacked in the shop awaiting it’s second life. It is incredibly beautiful, even in its rough cut state. I can’t wait to see it planed and polished.
The shop is slowing taking form. We built lumber racks above the built-in cabinet storage so that I could get some of my extra thick stock out of the way. Before we left Cloverdale, I picked up several 12/4 (“twelve-quarter”, or 3-inch thick) maple and walnut boards from Ted and Cheryl at Straightline Wood Products in Hastings. Together with some of the 2-inch red cherry we just bought and some barn beams that are purported to be coming to me from my friend Gary from Benefits Resources, I should have plenty of huge stock for mantles, thick table tops and carving projects. The shop still needs 220V power run and some more lighting before it’s ready to rock, not to mention floor to ceiling racking on one wall for my odds and ends lumber scraps.
I did also take a job at Torch Lake Classics, a boat restoration and repair shop just up the road. My friends from Dewitt Marine gave the owner there my information and he took me on ASAP. It’s a great gig: part-time, flexible hours, engaging work on cool old boats, an easy-going boss and a lot of potential for leads on future work and material. It’s a great introduction to the neighborhood and is sharpening my skills for handcraft. I’ve attached some pictures of the boats we’re working on right now.
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- chriscraft holiday sheer
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- 40s sailboat hull
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- 40s sailboat interior varnish
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- 40s sailboat
The dirtsong website is soon going to transition to focusing on our woodcrafting, so stay tuned. I’m going to be getting my shop set up in the next few weeks so I’m out hunting for various tools and parts to get the electric all set up. I’ll also be posting pictures from the classic boat restoration work I’ll be involved with on a part-time basis starting March 26th.
Here is a list of projects that are in the works:
- sawhorses
- a few carved utensils for the ISLAND benefit on April 7th
- a carved totem pole for our friend Ginny (I haven’t forgotten)
- a workbench for my shop that doesn’t skitter across the floor when I’m planing
- an island for our kitchen so Stephanie has plenty of counter space
- a surprise for my in-laws using cherry leftover from their living room tables/cabinet
- a workbench for my shop that doesn’t skitter across the floor when I’m planing
I might have forgotten one or two and the order will change…
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- Soon to be filled…
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- We hauled.
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- Stephanie’s Blueberry Pancakes!
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- The original vikings used Uhaul.
Our move started around noon on Thursday with my folks (Tim’s) and our great friends from Green Gardens Farm, Trent and Ruthie. Stephanie and I had packed all of our stuff up into boxes, if possible and had a plan of how we’d load the truck. All of my and our previous moves have been relatively small in size and easily executed. But this past year, we have steadily filled the large house we’ve been renting from our Brickyard Farm friends, Val and Kim.
There is nothing that reminds a person of how rich (and overloaded) he is than to try to load all of his possessions into the back of a 20 foot Uhaul and realize that they are not going to fit. I joked that we might be the 1% :)
So my dad rushed back to Hastings and rented the only trailer left and we filled that too (as well as two minivans). We tried to give as much stuff to Trent and Ruthie as they’d take, also. We thanked the two and said goodbye late Thursday afternoon, and got up early the following morning to work our way north.
After meeting up with Stephanie’s folks in Alden at our new place, we unloaded hastily to try to beat the coming winter storm that was to dump over a foot of snow on us that night. We returned the Uhauls just in time and that Friday night, sometime in the wee hours we lost power and didn’t regain it until Sunday night. The contents of our chest freezer were removed and replaced six times over the course of three days to keep them frozen. We dearly missed our woodstove as a non-powered heat source. But it was a fun time with both of our sets of parents as we began the task of whipping our new house into shape.
We are so grateful to all of the people who helped us make this move, whether through physical support, a lending of a trailer, a loading of boxes, a freezing of burritos, or through encouragement and friendship, making a space in your world for our dreams, a intimate chat over coffee, a vote of confidence for our decisions, an offer to let Wheeler play with your dog while we load boxes. Moving can make a person feel rich in many more ways than one.
Well, it’s almost accomplished.
I’m waiting on some bullet door catches coming from Canada, but for the most part, the last in the set of four cabinets commissioned by my in-laws is done.
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- End Table w/ Drawer
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- Coffee Table
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- End Table w/ Shelf
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- End Table w/ Drawer in place
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- Coffee Table in place
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- Chairside Cabinet
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- Curved Door
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- Drawer Pull
It’s taken about 180 board feet of cherry wood and just under 6 weeks of actual work to complete the four commissioned pieces. Just imagine if I started the cabinets and could focus solely on them when I got the commission. I would have delivered them all a year ago! I have very patient and deliberate in-laws. I’ll deliver the final piece: the chairside cabinet, when we move to our new place in Alden, Michigan.
The chairside cabinet was my favorite of the four, but not as difficult to construct as the other three. No laminations were required and the cabinet is basically a rectangle. The drawer face and door are curved, though. I’m really pleased on how all of them turned out and am ready to start woodworking full time when we get to Alden.
There are some cool details of these pieces that I might post more about in the near future. Stay tuned. There will likely also be some changes to Dirtsong with regard to my woodworking and I’ll be excited to let you in on it when I have it figured out a little more.
As an update to our previous post, “Plans for 2012,” we wanted to let you know if you haven’t received our newsletter that we have found a place and will be moving at the beginning of March to Antrim County in beautiful Northern Michigan. We’re very excited! And we’ll miss you.
Our last day at the Kalamazoo Foods Market will be February 25th.
If you want to keep tabs on us, continue to visit this site or sign up for our newsletter. Communication will probably be sporadic as we get resettled, but feel free to send us a note if you wonder what we’re up to.
I feel like it’s a little unfair to say that we have “plans” for 2012 as it seems like the ground shifts under our feet daily as our brains grind away on their individual and collective dreamings. But we do have some changes we’d like to announce.
First, we are putting together a plan for Tim’s woodcraft over the next couple of months that we’ll share bits of when we’re ready. 2011 was really a year of exploration for him to see what he enjoyed making, how he enjoyed making it, and what other folks enjoyed so much of his that they bought it. Ha! We learned that there is a big difference between folks coming by and saying, “Wow, that’s amazing” and “Wow, that’s amazing, would you like me to pay you for it to make it my very own?” It’s a struggle that we both have as we work to develop this craft. How do we balance the love of craft with the need to have a viable business? There are a ridiculous number of great ideas that we and others both have for what Tim can make, but we need to narrow it down a little bit to a manageable number of items. This might sound very simple, but we have learned the (business) difference between someone’s “order” and someone’s “idea,” which is the impetus behind refining and clarifying what we make for sale. All of that said, a core part of Tim’s love for craft is to turn other people’s desires for a handmade piece into reality. We will always take custom orders, from the simplest of spoons to the most fantastical of creations.
Second, we’re moving forward on some dreams of ours that have been in the backs of our hearts for several years. It’s time to give them some air and sunshine and see if they grow. We have begun the process of moving further north (for a variety of personal reasons) and Stephanie (me) has also begun the process of discerning if graduate school is the next right step for her…and if so, how we can make that happen. These things mean that unless we find the perfect new spot very soon, we will not be growing herbs or anything else this year, except for ourselves! This has been a very heart-wrenching decision, as we had an amazing year in 2011 for our first year in business, and it greatly surpassed our expectations for what we could accomplish and how the community of Kalamazoo would respond to us. We continue forward with an earnest desire to continue growing, but also know that the time and dedication it takes does not allow for us to pursue some of these other things that are calling to us at the moment. We’ll have to tuck that away for a little while.
Finally, we know that this is not the conventional way to grow a fledgling craft or farm-based business. We’ve seen many others get slammed by folks who want them to eat crow or gleefully report that they knew they’d never make it. I’m glad that we have such a supportive community of friends and family that encourage us to shift into changes even if it’s painful (for them and for us). Change is HARD, which is frustrating since it’s so necessary. Thanks so much for following our musings, supporting us as friends and customers, and bolstering our spirits with your warm words. We’ll keep you posted as we get plans more firmly in shape, and as Tim creates new woodcraft. We will continue to sell our pistous, vinegars, and dried herbs at the Kalamazoo Foods Market all winter every other Saturday until further notice. (So if you like them, better buy them quick!!!)
Thanks, all.
We’re tickled pink that we shipped an item for the first time this week! Hopefully, it is merely the first shipment of many (our rural USPS station hopes so, too). The item in transit is a gorgeous inch and a half thick cutting board made of walnut and cherry, with ash on the end. We received the commission from the beautiful prairie state of Nebraska and know that the recipients will be preparing many a home-grown and home-made meal on it. (Note: I did say beautiful! I maintain that Nebraska is a wonderfully pretty state. Complainers that Nebraska is boring have only driven through it on I-80. Once you get off of that highway, it is breathtaking. Try a different route, folks, and repeat for Kansas.)
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- a pretty surface makes cooking that much more wonderful
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- board in process
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- finished board
One of my favorite ways to cook is to recreate leftovers into something new. This can certainly be made from scratch, but also happens to be a great recipe for using up leftover carrot coins, of which I had PLENTY after the way-too-much Thanksgiving feast we hosted this year. You can easily use seasoned carrots or sweet potatoes that you have left over by rinsing the seasonings off with cold running water through a colander. It’s also a very soothing soup on the stomach after several days of feasting on rich foods, warming but not too heavy–especially if you choose not to use any cream. As with most soups, taste as you go and adjust to your taste. Please don’t skip the cilantro pistou! It really adds a great vibrancy and freshness to the soup. Fresh chopped cilantro can also be used of course. Try anywhere between 1 tsp. and 1 Tblsp. per bowl depending on your taste. Add the pistou or fresh cilantro to your serving bowls; if you cook it with the soup you will lose that fresh taste. *If you picked this recipe up at the cooking demo I did for this soup at the Art Hop last week, I have tweaked it slightly by adding the apple cider vinegar that I’d left off on my printout. Recipe follows below the pics from the demo.
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- Carrot Ginger Soup sample cups
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- Pureeing the soup
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- Getting ready for the demo
Carrot Ginger Soup with Cilantro Pistou
- 2 lbs or about 15 medium carrots
- 1 sweet potato
- 1 small red onion, finely diced
- 1 Tbsp butter or olive oil for sauteeing the onion
- 4-6 cups vegetable or chicken stock (depends on how thick or thin you like it)
- 2-4 Tbsp grated fresh ginger (or more to your taste)
- a couple dashes of apple cider vinegar
- Salt and pepper to taste
- sea salt and freshly ground pepper, to your taste
- 1/2 tsp (or more) cilantro pistou for each serving bowl
Optional Adds:
- If you want it creamier: 1 cup heavy cream, half & half, or coconut milk
- 1 tsp smoked paprika
- 1 Tbsp yogurt for each serving bowl
Dice the carrots and steam them for 7 minutes. Dice the sweet potato into 1 inch cubes and boil for about 10-15 minutes or until soft. Meanwhile, sauté the onion in your stockpot with the butter until soft. Add the drained, cooked carrots and sweet potato and pour in the stock and the ginger. Warm up. Using an immersion blender or carefully transferring to a stand-alone blender, blend the soup very well. Heat back up again, adding salt and pepper and adjusting to taste. If you’re using cream or paprika, add it now. Ladle into bowls and add a dollop of yogurt if using, and a teaspoon of cilantro pistou to each bowl. It’s also very cute to make a heart with some Sriracha chili paste around the cilantro in each bowl, if you want it a little spicy.
(Photo credit for the pics above: Nicole de Beaufort)
Wow. Thanksgiving really cornered our attention for the last couple of weeks…in a good way! I have some pictures I want to share with you and some cool ideas for leftovers I came up with the last few days as we tried to use up the mountains of food we had left over. As we’ve mentioned to many of you at the market, this was our first year hosting Thanksgiving. We are totally pleased with how everything turned out, but we did make one probably very common rookie mistake: we made WAAAAAAAAYYYYYYYYYY too much food. Luckily our family members took a lot home with them, but we still have a lot to go through. We’ve been recreating a lot of the leftovers, so expect to see a post soon of the ginger carrot soup with cilantro pistou that I made last night.
But on to my purpose for a quick post. We’re going to be participating in Kalamazoo’s Art Hop tomorrow night, December 2nd. And we’ll be in two places at once! You can find Tim at the Park Trades Center in James Collins’s studio; he’ll have lots of new woodwork on display, priced nicely for a handmade Christmas gift. And Stephanie will be at the Can-Do Kitchen with our pistous, and will be doing a cooking demo with one of them. Come eat samples! There will also be a gift basket the Kitchen is raffling off that will be chock-full of nibbles from us as well as several other Can-Do clients. We’d love to see you, and Stephanie especially doesn’t want to come home with any NEW leftovers from the cooking demo, so please come wanting to eat a bite or two.
I made this tonight in about 20 minutes to go with pork chops, and this ended up being the star. The herb feature is fresh oregano. It is a hearty, warming salad for these blustery days, which I really needed for the night of our first snow. It came together as most of my salads do: what I had on hand, what needed to be used tonight, and what my tastebuds were craving.
It ended up being filling without too heavy, a smidge tart, a teeny sweet, a tiny bit spicy. Together all those little bits made a great dish. If you’re vegetarian or not wanting meat for the night, this would go really well with a barley pilaf instead of pork chops. I think it would also be a pleasingly unconventional, delicious side for a roast chicken or BBQed tempeh.
Click “Read more” to see the full recipe, and enjoy!
