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Next month, one of my sisters is participating as a vendor at the first annual DIY Street Fair in Ferndale, MI. If you’re in the Detroit area September 20th or 21st, I encourage you to visit the “Elbe Everyday” stand, where you’ll be able to purchase hand-made and wonderfully-designed aprons and more.
As big-box retailers continue to expand and in some cases cannibalize on other sources of household goods, it’s wonderful to see the continuation of the localized and community-focused craft fair. Community craft fairs are in abundance this time of year, and are both a great place to purchase unique, handmade items, and a wonderful environment of creativity and inspiration for your own DIY projects.
As well as offering an alternative to mass-produced and location-insensitive merchandise, items at craft fairs are often locally-sourced, well-built and contain no packaging waste, purchases support talented community members so as to sustain one’s local economy, and the atmosphere is simply a great backdrop for spending time with friends and family on a warm, late-summer afternoon.
Much like getting fresh foods from a farmer’s market opens doors of communication and begins to blur the lines between creator and consumer, attending a craft-fair provides a rare opportunity to chat with the person or people who made a particular item. Striking up a conversation and developing a relationship with these creative community members allows for the opportunity to perhaps learn how to go about a new DIY project and become a more self-reliant person, or to share thoughts on common passions and perhaps launch a new community organization committed to knitting blankets so people can turn down their thermostats in the winter, or sewing reusable shopping bags for the local co-op, for example.
So please share some of your favorite craft fairs in the comments, then head out to your local craft fair with re-useable shopping bag and refillable water bottle in hand (or get these essential items at the craft fair if you don’t already have them), and be ready for a great experience with numerous benefits to both the community and the earth.
K and I this past Saturday took some liberties with our August Challenge, as we were only actually outside for an hour or two. We remained in the spirit of bringing seasonal ecosystem occurrences into our lives, though, as we traveled to a farm just north of Chicago to pick and then can fresh, local tomatoes.
Getting our produce primarily though a CSA this growing season, we’ve learned more about the seasonality of vegetables, especially the narrow window during late summer to enjoy fresh tomatoes, and the versatility of dishes that rely on the ripe fruit. Not wanting to rely so much on store-bought “fresh” and canned tomatoes in the coming year, we decided to try our hand and the craft of canning, and picked a half-bushel of tomatoes, which yielded ten quarts of canned tomatoes.
This being our first year canning, I’d rather not try to offer a guide to safe canning, but will point readers in the direction of Ball’s comprehensive Blue Book of Canning, and suggest researching the plethora of canning tips that can be found online, including this clear guide from Chow.com: Make Your Own Preserves. I will mention that our day of canning was a very rewarding experience, and that all went well as far as we can tell, save for two jars that didn’t seal properly, so are now in the refrigerator for use this week.
Our trip to the u-pick farm in the morning proved an interesting experience, as we observed the trend of small farms rapidly being engulfed by suburban development. It seemed paradoxical that in an effort to live more sustainable ourselves, K and I had to travel to an area that was developing in a largely unsustainable manner, with automobile-culture an expectation and the measurement of prosperity based on conspicuous consumption. There was a notable lack of walkability in the area teeming with new housing development, and central shopping and eating areas in the community came in the form of strip-malls surrounded by large parking lots and consisting mostly of chain-businesses that will do little to sustain the local economy.
While the farm we visited managed to survive through development, I wonder at how many acres of land in the area that once were home to rich food crops and seasonally-shifting landscape had now been morphed into monotonous topography widely disjointed from the natural terrain and clime. At what point had moving out to the country no longer meant seeking a life more in-tune with nature and instead meant keeping up with facile trends?
A goal I have for myself as winter approaches is to preserve some of the fresh local foods I can get now so that come winter I won’t be so dependent on supermarket food. I had a brief introduction to canning last year when I made a batch of strawberry freezer-jam, and to further ease myself into the craft of canning, I recently made a batch of homemade sauerkraut.
The recipe I used for my sauerkraut comes from Alice Waters’ The Art of Simple Food and was surprisingly simple. After breaking off some of the tougher outer leaves of a head of cabbage, I chopped it in half then in quarters and then thinly sliced the cabbage to get thin strips. I put the cabbage in a bowl with 3 and 1/2 teaspoons of salt and worked the two together with my hands. After a few minutes, the cabbage started creating its own juices. I then transfered the cabbage to a quart-size jar (might need larger depending on the size of the cabbage) and filled a smaller jar with water to hold down the cabbage to keep the brining liquid over it. I covered the jar with a towel, left it at room-temperature and skimmed off any scum that appeared on the top of the liquid over the next week.
After a week, the sauerkraut is ready for tasting. It can be left to brine for a few more days, or if it’s to your liking, it can be stored in the refrigerator for about 6 weeks. Though the smell of the sauerkraut initially worried me, my mom assured me that it’s suppoed to smell like bad cabbage, and after tasting it I knew that I all had gone according to plan. I’m pretty proud of my homemade sauerkraut, which K and I are enjoying on reubens for lunch this week, and will have with sausage and applesauce if any is left-over.
I’m looking forward to whatever my next canning opportunity may be. I’m especially looking forward to tomatoes, which have been slow-growing in the area this year, and of which I plan to can an ample supply for chili and pasta-sauces throughout the colder months. Do you have any canning tips, stories, etc. you’d like to share? I’d love to hear some success stories or cautionary tales before my next project.
After gathering this week’s laundry, instead of reaching for store-bought detergent, I grabbed a container of freshly homemade laundry detergent. I’ve long been aware of the potentially harmful ingredients used in many commercial cleaning products and have made the switch to more thoughtful brands such as Seventh Generation, Ecos and Method, but more recently I have begun the switch to homemade cleaning products that revolve around a simple set of natural ingredients that I can buy in bulk to reduce packaging waste and fuel for shipping. Homemade products also allow me to monitor exactly what ingredients I use, and make me aware of the energy involved in converting raw ingredients into a finished product.
For my powdered laundry detergent I used this basic recipe:
Finely shred 1 (4 oz) bar of castile soap either in a food processor or with a box-grater. Mix soap flakes with 1 cup each of Washing Soda and Borax. Store in an airtight container. Use 1-2 Tablespoons per load of laundry.
I reused a large yogurt tub for storage and used 1 Tablespoon for a large load that I washed in cold water. The clothes came out clean, but I might use a little more next time to retain some of the fresh sent of the Kirk’s castile soap, or perhaps increase the ratio of soap to powder in my next batch. A few drops of essential oils in each load can also be used to add a pleasant smell to the laundry, and depending on which oil, might also increase the cleaning power of the detergent. I was initially worried that the powdered detergent wouldn’t dissolve in the cold water, but it worked quite well as far as I can tell. If you’d rather stick with a liquid detergent, however, The Simple Dollar has a great post on making a liquid detergent as well as a cost analysis of how much money can be saved making the detergent yourself.
While I still drive my clothes to the laundromat and use a dryer instead of air-drying my clothes (mostly because of a lack of space in my apartment), I’ll be toting my yogurt container of homemade detergent proudly each laundry-day from now on, knowing that at least my detergent is doing minimal harm to the environment, and with the satisfaction of having become just a little more self-reliant.
