PEP Badge: Oddball

I didn't find a BB for this, so I'm thinking this is the best place. I made paper from entirely nettled from my backyard! I made a thread about it here which has even more pictures. To make this thread load faster, I'm just posting a few from the process.

processing nettles I harvested

Used both freshly pealed nettles, as well as some nettles that I'd retted in the grass behind my house.

nettle on the left from retted nettles, the rightside nettled are freshly peeled

To break down the fibres, I boiled them in washing soda and baking soda

boiling in alkaline water

Then I let it dry, rubbed it a ton, and then beat it to a pulp with a marble rolling pin.

rubbing the nettle over a paper bag to catch the tiny strands

The pulped nettles were easy to pull apart

A lot of the videos I watched on making paper had people adding something mucilaginous to the water, like okra. I don't have any okra, but I did have some mallow sprout up in my garden. I harvested the seeds and took one long stem and chopped them all up in a pot of water and boiled it.

harvesting mallow

boiling the chopped mallow

I then poured the mallow into a pyrex dish and used a deckle (a wooden frame with a fine mesh attached across it) to make the paper.

blob of nettle pulp before stirring

using the deckle to make paper!

I laid the paper on an old (CLEAN) cloth diaper on top of my washing machine. There's terrible lighting there, but it's a flat surface that's out of the way.

four nettle pages drying

I let the paper dry, and then pressed it flat under a stack of books. All those nettles made me four cute little pages of nettle paper!

four pages of 100% nettle, lying in a row

my four pages of nettle paper, held in front of the nettle patch from whence they came

All in all, it took at about an hour and half of active work to make 4 pages of paper. Harvesting the nettle was 5 minutes. Processing the nettle to strands was at least half an hour. Rubbing it took 10-20 minutes. Bashing it to a pulp was 5-10 minutes. Using the deckle took maybe 2 minutes.

Good day!  I was getting the weeds and dirt out of a crack at the joint between the sidewalk and the driveway when I thought "My goodness, this is an oddball badge bit!"

I used a pressure washer to wash the dirt and weeds out of the crack.  There is no before pic because it did not occur to me that it was SKIP worthy until I got the weeds washed out.  I left them next to the crack to show how many weeds there were, but I understand that "pics or it didn't happen" is the name of the game.  

Being tired of having weeds in this crevice I thought to fill it with some scrap mahogany strips free of any finish or product.  The strip of wood will be a photo barrier and hopefully keep growing media and seeds from washing into the space.  According to www.wood-database.com mahogany has a moderate durability against rot.  I have no problem with that.  When it rots and the weeds come back, I figure I will just do this all again with perhaps a harder wood (should I have scraps of some) in the future.

After I tapped the strips into place I trimmed the height to prevent it from becoming a tripping hazard.

I am a carpenter by trade, so a professional did this work and it took him/me about an hour.

I built a chicken tractor which will be used as a brooder box/growout and possibly for rabbits as well. We'll use mobile chicken coops for the adult chickens in rotation after the sheep/goats on the pasture.

It is 54" wide, 8' long, and 28" high. Weighs about 130 pounds and has a pull cable that attaches to either end to make it easy to move. Has a door on one end and the roof opens up for easy access.

I constructed a pocket organizer for all my markers and nonsense. It was over flowing it's allotted shelf and I didn't want to mess with it to find anything. All that's left on the shelf are unsharpened pencils and paints. It also helped me think out the jeans scrap pile. It probably took about 4 hours to hand sew.

Hi!  Previous homeowner installed a bathroom and made a few mistakes.  This is how I fixed one of them.  The faucet handles were backwards, cold on the left, hot on the right.  At the recommendation of a licensed plumber I bought new hoses to ensure proper seating of the seals in the hoses to eliminate the chance of leaking.  It took a little less than an hour to move stuff out of cabinet, fix, clean up, and put stuff back.

Does this BB count as Oddball, Plumbing, both?  Not sure how oddballs count in other categories.

Replaced a zipper on a cotton hoodie with one salvaged from an old synthetic windbreaker that was in bad shape.

Machine sewn.

Tools: sewing machine, stitch ripper, scissors, thread, headpins.

We have some grape vines that were growing up the side of our deck, so me, and my sister cut a bunch of junkpoles, and lag-screws, after we collected enough recourses we built an arbor so that they would have some support while growing, This took a little while, but hopefully it shall serve it's purpose well.


                                                                                                SISTER'S POST BELOW THIS POST
                                                                                                 
                                                                                                                       ll
                                                                                                                       V

My brother and I built an arbor for our grape and kiwi vines. We used young poplar trees for most of the structure and some 2 by 5's (I think) for the braces.  Apologies in advance for the underabundance of pictures!

I had a customer who needed some rotten railings replaced.  I copied the old rails and balusters exactly by disassembling and measuring the old pieces and parts.  A total of 16 feet of railing components were milled from redwood 2"x12"s, assembled, primed/painted, and installed.  The job took me 33 hours from start to finish.  Of those hours, 25 were in accordance with permaculture values (i.e. untreated wood) then there was the filling, caulking, priming and painting which were of modern synthetic materials and took about 8 hours (there is an astonishing amount of caulking and surface area to rails such as these!).

This job was bunches of fun and the client is a very nice person as well.  I'm living the dream!

Have been working on the Nest badge and this did not fit there.  Wondering if it fits here.

Railings were rusted with chipping paint.  I used a wire brush to take off the rust and chipped area, cleaned what the brush did not take off, prepped the area with repurposed cardboard that had too many stickers for the garden, and sealed it with rust-prevention paint that was left over from HVAC repair (did not find a permie-friendly paint equivalent - if there is one that will prevent rust, I would appreciate the pointer.)