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Coffee-jar cover that I hand-sewed from someone’s discarded koozie that was still new. (Hey, it’s a beach town and a tourist town so it’s also a thrift upcycle scavenger’s town lol.)

The custom cover on my enamelled metal cup is similarly hand-sewn and has a crocheted bottom.

I’m making this post not to brag about my very modest accomplishments but rather, as a demonstration of how sewing is constantly in demand if we step out of relentless consumerism. Same with carpentry and a bunch of other basic skills.

(Very important! Note, my posts are never meant to shame anybody who needs to buy stuff and doesn’t have time to make stuff. We live in a rushed treadmill world. And those of us who are capable of stepping back or walking out of it even partially are responsible for helping those who are more stuck. We need to share our time, talents, money, encouragement etc.)

A big thing I’m trying to say here is that sewing and needlework have become “crafty recreation hobbies.” Granted, they are very fun crafty hobbies. But a lot of ladies of a certain age who just love to crochet and knit and sew, run out of recipients for the items that they lovingly make.

Whereas in a less consumer – centered time, Sewing etc. was mandatory and constantly there were things that needed to be sewed and mended. I always have a bit of a mending pile of dish towels that need hemming, old towels that needs cutting up, Clothing and household items that need to be patched etc. In addition I always have a mental pile of a wish list of things I plan to get around to making.

In this mode, I rarely run out of recipients for my handiwork, because I’m busy making stuff that my household needs! Of course this does not preclude sharing with one’s friends and neighbors as well. I sometimes do give away my handstitched bags and other creations. I gave one to a tourist in need a few weeks ago, and one to an unhoused neighbor awhile back. And one to the lady I buy my organic produce from. To serve as a prop to encourage their customers to get in the habit of reusable bags.

Interestingly, the mending pile doesn’t have to be a treadmill. If the “sewing head of household” Has some autonomy, as many of us have these days, we get to decide how to chip away at the pile and only our inner stern critic is our enemy.

Why is all of the above, why does it matter? Well, making and bending things by hand is intrinsically fulfilling those of us who are inclined in that direction. Same as carpentry is fulfilling for people who are drawn to build things. And mechanics is fulfilling for people who love to repair equipment and machinery. These are all wonderful fulfilling activities, and in a society where more of us refuse to be only consumers, and insist on stepping up to our natural human state of being makers and producers, these activities become daily vital Lifesprings of the household.

Hope this makes sense, I have had a lot of thoughts lately so I’ve gotten a little bit less picky and less edity in my communication.

I don’t want to be a little old lady who needs to make things so badly that the stuff I make ends up being a huge volume piled up in someone’s closet. For somebody else to have to declutter, and then it goes to landfill. Actually it’s been some years since I had that worry, but I did used to worry that my innate drive to make things would just end up producing piles of junk and trash. Now everything I make is essential because it’s driven by my actual personal needs and household needs!

And honestly not all of us need intricate work to keep us entertained. Some of us are content to spend hours just plain old thread and needle making plain old seams. The mental benefits are the same! And even better if you have a little crafting circle who sit and chat. It’s been a while since I’ve had that — and may never again unless people are willing to meet outdoors a bit more — but I still immensely enjoy sitting and stitching and tuning into the quiet and calm channel of the universe.

Pix here on my Deep Green Facebook page!

DOG POOP HAZARD! I put this makeshift weighted sign here on the sidewalk as a courtesy to warn neighbors and other passersby, but for future incidents I may make some miniature orange traffic cones that say “dog poop hazard <poop emoticon>” on them. (You can see a photo on my Facebook post.)

Humor can be effective too! And we could all use a laugh in our day. I picture people doing a double-take at some homemade miniature orange traffic cones. With maybe some bright-yellow “crime scene” tape around them. <wink emoticon>

When people let their dogs poop on the sidewalk, I usually put sand over it and let it bake/dry in the blistering Florida sun for a day, and then clean it up off of the sidewalk. Once it’s dry, it’s way less obnoxious to clean up.

what if almost all clothes lived in community closets — say, block or neighborhood scale — and we only kept a very few articles of clothing at home?

What prompted this sudden creative spark was being irritated at the volume of clothing in my bedroom/office.

Now, I have vastly less clothing than most people I know. I love fashion and get a kick out of sewing and being creative; I just don’t like owning a whole bunch of things. I enjoy having a few reliable basic pieces, and then decorating with scarves or what have you. Or if I want a fancy outfit for one night I might go to a thrift shop. But usually I just find stuff that’s being thrown away in my neighborhood and turn it into “new” wardrobe items.

But this morning, even the small* volume of clothing in my room was irritating me. Part of the reason was there is this weird musty smell suddenly back there. So I immediately want to blame the density of fabric hanging up.

(* I see a small volume of clothing, but that is very relative. By the much more reasonable standards of other times and places, I still have a vast amount of clothing.)

But my mind generates all these fun and creative thoughts, thanks to some training I’ve had in permaculture design and other thinking out of the box.

So I lit a couple candles and some incense to maybe dry out the moisture and take the edge off the smell til i find the real culprit, and then I really had fun musing about how very few clothes I could get away with owning, if we had a neighborhood-scale clothes closet.

Everybody, just seems like everybody, is trying to get rid of their clothes. People drop off huge boxes of unwanted clothing the way some people who are good at gardening drop off eggplants on peoples doorsteps in the summer and run away.

But we can’t just throw away the clothing. We have to stop sending it to landfill, it off and even ends in landfill in the Atacama Desert or some other foreign land that certainly doesn’t deserve that trash.

I tried to take a picture of my clothes corner of my room for you but it’ll have to wait till it gets lighter. Not enough light right now to take a pic.

Even in cold places, people don’t need lots and lots of clothes. You want layers and a good shell and all that.

The abnormally large volume of clothing we own is undoubtedly yet another artifact of consumer capitalist culture.

I do have some fun experiences of something like a community closet. They have been at multi-day music festivals, art festivals, and other “hippie-ish” camping events events. Usually it’ll be some women who set it up in a tent or something.

Also I have been to clothing swaps organized by friends in somebody’s big living room.

And in my neighborhood, a church that gives out a big grocery bag once a week to local families in need has a little bit of a clothing rack that they bring out. What would be cool is if that could be open most or all of the time instead of just for a couple hours on Wednesdays.

Everything takes work. For something to be open, it would need to be loved and cared for by the community. If not, it falls on the shoulders of one or two volunteers and quickly falls apart.

I even find that as a steward of a Little Free Library for the past 13 years. Seems like it shouldn’t be that much work just providing a few shelves of books for my community.

but it takes an astonishing amount of work to keep things neat, keep the shelves in repair so they protect the box at least a little from the weather. I also have to manage large boxes of unwanted drop offs that people just drop off. I don’t need just large volumes of books; I mean like huge boxes of peoples unwanted clothing and stuff. As many of you who have tried to do a community thing no, a person doing a community thing sometimes just becomes the designated drop off spot for a lot of unwanted stuff.

Just some musings. I tend to not give up on stuff that’s worthwhile. I tend to try to tweak it, add something, subtract something, make something creative that will make it more lovable so people care enough to try to help take care of it.

Honestly I have not been all that good at attracting help. but I’ve realized that it’s not that I’m horrible or defective or something; it’s just a feature of modern life. We are very atomized and isolated, and people have to relearn how to even be in community. The concept of any kind of shared community thing whether it’s a repair café or tool garage or whatever. I have heard great examples working in other communities. I know it can work.

Do you know who inspires me? Coco Chanel! Supposedly she loved to just basically have a uniform, something that looks stylish but doesn’t require a lot of thought, and you don’t need very many of them. That’s really my ultimate goal. The capsule wardrobe concept is somewhat appealing to me.

Also I do need to mention that I live in Florida and operate my house as a low-footprint-living laboratory that includes living without air-conditioning in order to learn how to optimize shade and airflow (Well, I also do it because I really despise closed-up indoor environments, fake cold air, and electric bills over $18).

as such, living in an incredibly humid hot environment without forced air cooling, not only puts me on a quest for how to optimize passive cooling of the home, but also a quest to optimize comfort of the body, through appropriate fabrics and styles of clothing. That’s a whole Nother post and I have to tell you I haven’t gotten very close to the ideal, but let’s just say that sometimes synthetic fabrics such as board shorts used by surfers are surprisingly adaptive to this climate.

I like to say that I am my own experimental lab-rat of the low-footprint-living lab. When the heat and humidity, and mosquitoes finding their way in, and intrusive streetlights at night, and excessively aggressive “landscapers” during the day, and what have you start making me crazy, I take it as an invitation to look around and optimize something! I also remind myself that it’s for the collective liberation and redemption of this gross, dreary consumerist capitalist hell non-culture we have built. That renews my wellspring of energy. (So does my morning coffee, one of my favorite treats which I try to make as sustainable as possible; and which I accept that I may have to do without someday sooner rather than later.)

Post script update!

Update! And just like that, the mini community closet is in the communal space of the house now. It’s one of those trial run tentative experimental structures that will evolve over time. Photo on left shows the clothes hanging on the improvised structure.

Photo in the middle shows it covered with a white sheet because I’m really obsessive about quiet solid tranquil surroundings at every day times. Also, as I was hanging it up, I realized I also now have a projector screen for showing YouTube videos and stuff from off our phones or whatever. I have a little mini projector. It doesn’t get used much but in a fictitious hypothetical communal house, it will be our Indian village TV, indoor version. I also want one outside.

Photo on the right shows the other side of the communal living room area, to show you what I mean when I say I like quiet light color scheme for the communal space. It just seems to feel good and work well. The cool thing is that does not preclude a luscious mix of textures from various beautiful pieces of fabric I’ve picked up over the years including inherited multigenerational handmade etc. Long line of women who love to work with fabric and our hands!

Go here, to the post on my deep green Facebook page, to see the photos (for as long as time and the will of various entities shalt allow, as I am fond of repeating LOL).

(You will need to scroll down through the whole comment thread to see the photos, as the original post is just what I call “attention-grabbing poster-style,” text on a green background.)

Post script: And update on the yucky smell, I came to suspect it might be a dead animal outside, as opposed to something inside. So the yucky smell, a negative, ended up prompting me to do something that brought a positive: adding value to this evolving living laboratory!

On a meta-note: in recent months I have more and more frequently resorted to a composition technique that I have come to call “laddering.” It’s a way of getting words out of my brain and onto the screen or paper, without either procrastinating or deciding not to post.

I’ve been learning that a lot of times the posts I *almost* didn’t make (because I thought they were too stupid or jibber jabbery, ill-formed etc.), ended up really resonating with people.

So as one example of laddering, this post here on FB might get edited and later become a blog post. (Actually that’s what happened, because you’re here reading this blog post now!)

Sometimes a comment that I make on someone else’s post or a group I’m in, will end up laddering-up to a whole independent post I make here on FB, and then ladder-up to a blog post or work its way into a book or something. Mentioning it in case other people have trouble with lackluster motivation, procrastination, avoidance.

Using cut-up pieces of a lightweight reflective silver fabric sun-shelter that I found discarded on the beach, today I experimented with further reducing solar gain by covering outwardly-opening windows. This is also meant to reduce light intrusion from street lights at night.

It’s not low-hanging fruit like my homemade trellis awnings, or the thick drapes over the big windows. But already it still seems to be a worthwhile improvement in heat reduction. So I will probably make it a little more official by hemming the pieces and sewing little custom ties onto them. As opposed to just having them clipped with clothes pins etc. the way it is now.

See photos here of my preliminary effort.

I seem to have good results with things like this when I am willing to let myself start with a really “rough draft,” so to speak. Instead of feeling like I have to right away produce some perfectly tidy, professional-looking little window covers.

By the way, I notice I feel kind of OK with rooms being a little bit dark in the summer. What would feel gloomy in the wintertime feels cool and soothing in the summer. My windows are optimized to let in plenty of sunlight in the winter.

This is the post from Desireé B Stephens that I made the comments below in response to. https://www.facebook.com/share/1FDv6akAxi/?mibextid=WC7FNe

In case the link doesn’t work, it’s on her Facebook page and it’s titled: “Refuge Outside the Regime: How We Hold, Heal & Build in a Time of War
For those choosing not to participate in empire’s violence here’s what we can do.”

Here are some of my thoughts:

Right here right now, right where we live.
Redirecting resources from supporting war and prisons to forming a care and safety net.

I keep my money off of Wall Street because I don’t trust what it’s supporting, even in a so-called socially responsible fund. I’d rather support people in the local economy. Land and buildings, for anyone who can afford them, and then share them.

I always prefer to share my house (Which is also my place of business and hopefully also future bookstore/community house or something) with housemates, displaced people, People who just need time to think and refresh at the beach, etc.. It saves money, and offers many other benefits as well.

HyperLocal in our neighborhoods, and also can be in our online communities as well.

my neighborhood finally seems to be getting a critical mass of full-time residents including a number of families with children. The change is palpable, people are connecting and checking on each other. And it’s not some La La Land where everybody subscribes to some identical ideology etc. It’s just regular people looking out for each other.

Sharing skills and resources is just smart, plus there’s a lot more joy and satisfaction. and safety! A lot of main stream folks are concerned about safety, but what people don’t always realize is that the main way to have safety is to simply be connected and interact regularly. That’s what a safe neighborhood is. My neighborhood gets a bad rap for being dangerous but that is a skewed portrayal based on mainstream visual images of HOA “tidiness.” 

My house, a grassroots laboratory of various experiments in low-footprint living, Is small but equipped to sleep 8 to 11. If I can have 11 bike week visitors camped out here (Which I did almost before the ink was dried on signing the title back in 2018), I could certainly have 11 refugees or displaced friends. And, I always have housemates, visitors, etc. sharing this house.

I’m saying this as an example of sharing existing resources, assessing what we have to offer and exchanging that information with neighbors.

Even something as small and simple as a Little Free Library (Which I have out front, together with shaded benches that the public can sit on) can become an unofficial neighborhood comfort point and emotional support center. Great way to take the pulse of the neighborhood, exchange news, see how people are doing.

I’ve learned in the neighborhood that you have to work with the social structures that people trust. In this neighborhood it’s people walking their dogs that finally broke down the barriers and got more people connected and talking with each other. That has blossomed into some skills sharing and mutual aid.

Also, this being a hurricane prone area, people are always receptive to chatting about disaster prep so that is a good on-ramp. Not everybody wants to hear about or talk about big preps for The Big Stuff, you know, TSHTF / TEOTWAWKI level stuff. But the preps for hurricanes are the same thing as “Big Major Preps.” Both physical and social.

Kind of rambling here, But really great tips from Desireé, and I strongly suggest you follow her for lots of liberating and refreshing content! And read the tips in her post, let’s start that WhatsApp or Signal chat in our physical neighborhoods and or our virtual neighborhood!

And here I will close with one of my favorite quotes from Desireé’s post (the following quote also sums up the message I’ve been striving to promote with my Deep Green book, blog, and living demonstration laboratory):

“Divest Intentionally. Invest Communally.
Every dollar, every hour, every scroll is a vote.”

I shared a post from BeSpainSavvy about tips for living without air-conditioning in Spain. Very good points. I live without AC in Florida by choice. These tips are all important.

I like how they phrase their motive (which is the same as mine) for choosing AC-free life: “If you’re like us — Team No AC because you’re saving the planet or just because you’re dodging a power bill that looks like a flight to Tokyo …”

My comments:

I have been very diligently trying to increase airflow in the house. And I love that my whole house floor is entirely ceramic tile, and sometimes yes I sleep on the bare tile.

(The tile is cold in winter but that’s what scatter rugs are for. In summer I roll up the rugs.)

It can be hard to convince local government to stop chopping down trees and mowing the grass down to bare sand, but at least we can plant vegetation in our yards and balconies.

Another of my favorite tips: cook outdoors all summer if possible. Also cuts down on bugs in the indoor kitchen. If you’ve never heard of a solar oven, check them out! Great way to cook outdoors with zero danger of fire.

In response to my share of the post from BeSpainSavvy about low-tech cooling tips in Spain, a permaculture colleague pointed out that not all of those methods work in a more humid place. While her observation is accurate, it doesn’t mean that we are forced to depend on air conditioning. Many traditional cultures have existed in many hot humid places for millennia without forced-air cooling.

I commented:

Yes there are sea breezes by the ocean <where I live, without AC, and where a number of “civilian” housemates have lived with me for various periods of time — in some cases several years — as well>.

BUT it would be a lot less stifling inland too if we would be more protective of trees and other vegetation.

Many traditional urban areas in other parts of the world are lined with trees, but especially here in Florida we seem to have something against trees.

You guys don’t have a seabreeze, but you have a lot less asphalt than we do and that should help.

Also I noticed sort of an analogy to microclimates. I might call it “time microclimates.” There are times of the day when it’s sunny and less humid, and thus evaporative cooling works for a little bit. I hang my sheets out during that time. I have also learned to hang sheets in such a matter that the sun strikes them instead of striking windows. We don’t have shutters so I use other things like that to keep sun from hitting windows.

Dependence on electricity for cooling is brutal. (Oops, that was supposed to be BRITTLE, but I’m going to leave that talk-to-text morph “brutal” there as well because it’s true too!) I hope more people start defending trees, and also re-learning passive methods as described here.

BTW, I NEVER expect to be cool in summer, and don’t even always expect to be comfortable, it’s not unusual for me to sweat at least some parts of the night in summer. Not ideal but not unusual. And if I don’t expect to be cool, those gentle puffs of natural coolness that arise at various times of night and day are very refreshing!

You are so right about the importance of cooling the body rather than trying to cool the whole space. It’s a little more flexible and not so energy dependent.

We in the permie community should never give up the quest to experiment with and promote low-tech DIY and passive / non-electric methods of cooling.

Hopefully even permaculture sites that use air conditioning are not just keeping it on all the time.

It’s too easy for the populace to be threatened by a power failure. They (corps, govt) could threaten us with anything, coerce us into things just by turning off the electricity. And we see that after a storm, people are in a massive panic state because they don’t know how to get along without electricity.

in Permaculture classes we learned so much about indigenous / low-tech building techniques that created superior adaptability to heat. Our modern industrial buildings are a big part of our problem with climate control dependence. Pushing the building codes to accommodate more naturally cooler buildings is an important part of our work. It prob won’t be easy but maybe the increasingly intense and frequent disasters will make it an easier sell.

“It’s impossible to live without air-conditioning” is a dangerous and expensive widespread message that unfortunately keeps getting more and more traction.

We should be looking at retrofitting houses to be more like in Belize, Queensland, Vietnam, dogtrot houses in TX, etc.

Here is the Facebook post including the OP from Spain, and we’re getting some great comments in the thread!

PS. Added another comment later to my colleague, who is a fellow Florida resident:

PS. hey K I just got a great idea! And it would give us a chance to hang out!

One, please come for a stay at my beach home and check out what we’re doing. And enjoy the ocean together and catch up!

Two, I’d like to come visit your place and experiment with creating some kind of little outdoor sleeping pod.

We can think of it as sort of cross-Florida collegial internship 🙂

Maybe other sites would be interested in the cross collaboration as well. This is really an extremely important front of our work, making it viable to live in Florida long-term without unsustainable centralized energy systems. It’s not just the operating costs it’s the repair bills and such that can make regenerative enterprises grind to a halt, force ppl to go out and get “jobs” in the dinosaur economy.

We’d be doing a great community service by putting our heads together and evolving the design of low-tech retrofits etc.

Another low-tech thing, one that doesn’t require retrofits, is simply sleeping in different rooms of the house in different seasons as temperatures change. When civilians are living here, they get their own private bedrooms if they want, but everybody is permitted and encouraged also to experiment with bringing portable bed into the common areas to stay cooler.

More thoughts:

• Also: there can be conflict between letting in air flow, and excluding unwanted light. This is particularly pronounced in urban areas where the officialdom have not yet caught up to the growing awareness that irresponsible/excessive/badly designed street lighting harms bird and insect populations, as well as being detrimental to the human nervous system. It would be great if we could just do like Paris and other cities and just shut our public lighting off at a certain hour like 1 AM or 2 AM. The movement for Dark Sky Cities is very encouraging and I hope more and more cities will get on board! I encourage everyone to mention it to your local government bodies if you have not already.

• And additionally: there can be conflict between airflow versus greenery that provides shade and privacy. I’ve started to be willing to compromise a bit on privacy just so I can have some more airflow.

Trigger warning: old-fashioned butt hygiene. Low-tech version of bidets. Liberation from needing toilet paper.

Still here? OK, read on!

A few years back, when the pandemic toilet-paper shortages started, I nade a couple of posts about bidets, toilet cloth, and how to make your own simple DIY bidet bottle. I also included links to articles about the traditional form of bidet which is a small dipper or pitcher.

If you do a search on “bidet” (or “Lota”) in this blog, you will find those old posts.

There is an additional great article I found the other day, when people online were talking about worry of toilet-paper shortage because of the tariffs.

A guy from the Philippines commented that there was nothing to worry about because of “tabo.”

Oh! I thought to myself. I bet a “tabo” must be the same thing as a Lota. And sure enough I was right. A tabo is a little water scoop used for in the Philippines for butt hygiene.

I’m telling you, I’ve been doing this for years and if you try it you might not want to go back either. It’s a whole new level of clean.

I’ve link to the article below. It goes into detail about the mechanics of how you go about cleaning yourself without needing to buy toilet paper.

A lot of people then dry off using reusable squares of “toilet cloth” (old pieces of fabric you cut or tear into squares). And note, you should NOT be having to wipe actual poop with the cloth, as your “parts down there” will already be clean before you blot them dry with the cloth. (Many people toss the cloths into a basket located near the toilet and then launder them in batches.)

The article even mentions that toilets in the Philippines often don’t have seats as we know them, because you need the extra room to work “back there” with the tabo.

Happy hygiene to you, and may you never have to worry about toilet-paper shortages. The planet will be better off as well, I suspect.

No toilet paper in the Philippines? Meet the Tabo. By Adam McKee. https://docmckee.com/travel/no-toilet-paper-in-the-philippines-meet-the-tabo/?amp=1