The Grind & Bind Art Alchemist's Guild

…or get better at, or fantasize about, or buy all the tools for and forget about.

This month’s theme is the original Roman festival of misrule, anarchy, drinking, fucking, human sacrifice maybe, and agriculture, and the sun.

Watercolour: https://www.jacksonsart.com/blog/2020/09/25/making-handmade-watercolours-with-jacksons-artist-pigments/

Celebrate the new year with some home-made pyrotechnics!

If you manage to perfect the art or flint knapping — you can upcycle any dense, broken glass into usefull knives, too.

My first attempt at blacksmithing — a butter knife made from a piece of iron rebar.

Jessica Angel is a New York based artist who bridges physical and virtual spaces with her reality bending work.

An update on the haul I got from the florist.

Nalbinding predates knitting and crochet, literally “needle-binding,” where lengths of spun fibre are joined together using a needle.

A much better set of instructions, since my quick and dirty run down on my last post left a lot to the imagination.

If it gets cold enough where you live, you can make huge ones outside out of six gallon pails and stock pots. Some Inuit and northern communities use similar techniques to make animal-proof ice fridges, especially when camping in winter.

A florist let me scavenge their trimmings yesterday. After two hours of separating everything by colour, I set the red, green, orange and yellow things to simmer for dye. That left me with all these white flowers, so I decided to soak them for paper making.

Inspired by Theo Jansen’s strandbeests, shelly is a giant, rideable, light-up hermit crab using Jansen’s open source linkage design for the crawly bits.

How about some old school photo developing to make better use of nature’s dark room? That is, if you’re as far north as am? Otherwise, I’m sure you could find a nice cave or a dark forest to practice the wilder prints methods.

’Tis the season for gifts. Whether you celebrate Saturnalia, Kwanzaa, God Birth, Krampus Attacks or Chanukah — the pressure is on to practice giving and gratitude and strained smiles.

In a highly innovative process, wheatgrass root is cultivated in 3D-printed templates that are then carved into beeswax. This guides the root to grow in certain patterns or shapes. In just 12 days, the roots bind into a naturally woven material, this is a great example of ‘bio-design’ and it creates a textile that is low-tech, organic, and biodegradable.

A one-off idea turned into a week of insanity and mutiple trips to the hardware store.

Like anyone without enough hobbies, I, too, have considered making my own bioplastics. Why? Why not. What would I do with them? Who knows? Something amazing probably.

In case you needed more reasons to stuff your pockets with rocks:

For all the hobby chemists of every kind. I’ve used this list countless times since it’s been published.

Gonna grow the hell out of these, then dye the hell out of stuff.

“Ink” covers everything from the fluid in fountain pens to the thick gel used in printing.

Photo: The gum wall in Seattle, Washington, U.S.A. by Hudson MacDonald on Pexels.

Did you know you can recycle paper on your own? You can even make paper out of non-paper.

As India nears its 100th year of independence, plans for highways, smart cities, and bullet trains dominate its future narrative. But in the hills of Meghalaya, another blueprint persists—one built not on concrete, but on roots. For generations, the Khasi and Jaiñtia tribes have grown bridges, not built them—living structures coaxed from rubber fig trees, shaped by hand over decades, passed down like heirlooms. But that inheritance is at risk. Tourism moves faster than the roots. Policy arrives from the top down. And the knowledge—passed barefoot through forests, from uncle to nephew—is fading.

As it turns out, you can make spinning even more labour intensive than a hand spindle by making one of the most basic tools yourself. It’s not efficient, but it is calming. When you finally get enough to make a small cloth, you’ll wonder why you didn’t just buy a skein at the store, then you’ll remember: That’s not how we do things here.

This is the most vivid yellow I’ve made so far. It only took the peels of about ten lemons to make 2x this (there will be much, much less when it dries.) I used the juice to shift the colour in my red cabbage dye, and to make a zesty screwdriver.

This page provides an “in-progress” alphabetical list of plants that I use successfully to eco print textiles and paper as described in my blog posts. The plants are garden-grown or foraged locally (in the Ottawa, Ontario area), with an emphasis on native plants for all North America, especially the north-east and that can also be grown in other parts of the world. I have given the common names in English and French, plus the scientific (Latin) names, noting briefly colours most often obtained in eco prints with alum mordant.

By rummaging in old libraries, I uncovered several ancient recipes for pastels. The authors most certainly had uses in mind other than street painting, but they served as a starting point. These were personal formulas based on the experiences and intuitions of the artists who wrote them down. They called for mixing natural pigments with a range of comestible binders, such as sugar, milk, fig’s milk, beer, ale, and honey. Orwell reports that pavement artists bought their colors in the form of powder and worked them into cakes using condensed milk as the binder. The old recipes simply consisted of ingredient lists, without mixing proportions, apart from the occasional spoonful or cupful of an ingredient (although there was no standardization for the size of a spoon or cup).

I was inspired to make a community after this post.