I actually finished a garment. OK, it's a hat. Not so big. Such is my attention span.

I'm making another one now. This one is a tad small, but I ran out of yarn. I decided to use red to finish it off, and I think it looks kind of neat. It's a feature, not a bug!

This hat is created from entrelac squares that are done in ribbing. I used 3 by 3 ribbing because it's quite stretchy and I didn't want to swatch or anything. I figured with the stretchiness the hat would fit my head no matter what.

I'm writing up a pattern for it. More pictures of this on my Flickr account, and more info at my Ravelry page (user name "yarnover").

Image by fuzzyjay via Flickr

Image by fuzzyjay via Flickr

Yay! I finished something.

How To: Seed Grenade

Things like this will never look the same after reading our long interview with Sara Redstone, plant quarantine officer from Kew Gardens, London, but they're still very cool.

This is how to make a "seed grenade," "seed bomb," or, more prosaically, seed ball.

Seed balls, simply put, are a method for distributing seeds by encasing them in a mixture of clay and compost. This protects the seeds by preventing them from drying out in the sun, getting eaten by birds, or from blowing away.

And they're not new. The blog post I'm quoting from is more than two years old—but "the seed ball method" itself, we read,"has been working for centuries."

I’ve read that some North American First Nations’ tribes used seed balls. More recently natural farming pioneer Masanobu Fukuoka has experimented with them. And, in New York City, seed bombs were used in 1973’s revitalization of the Bowery neighbourhood and the development of the city’s first community garden.

Landscapes at a distance. BLDGBLOG has already covered the idea of using military equipment in large-scale reforesting efforts, as well as the possibility of dropping "soil bombs" on Iceland.

But this wonderfully down-to-earth how-to guide for making everyday seed grenades saves you the hassle of purchasing decommissioned warplanes...

[Image: "This is what happens just a few day’s after dropping a seedbomb. The rain melted the clay and the compost, feeding the soil surrounding the bomb allowing for other plant growth." Image and text from Guerilla Gardener's Blog].

Just pack your seeds in a matrix of red clay, hurl your balls over a fence somewhere, and watch new worlds on the other side grow.

Posted Tuesday, December 08, 2009 • 5 comment(s)

Let a million flowers bloom!

Readability Bookmarklet Quick-Formats Pages for Smoother Text

A helpful little browser bookmarklet from Arc90 strips all but the main text out of any web page and re-formats its layout, size, and margins, creating a newspaper or novel-like page for easier text digestion.

This is teh awesome for older eyes, and for preparing a page for printing. It works about 80% of the time in my experience. Sometimes it doesn't parse a web page correctly and you get goop, but when it does work, you have a one-step method to produce a more-readable and printable web page. Good on text-heavy pages.

Of course, beards (imho) are *always* sexy.

Buy yourself some Neko Case today for only 1.99 at Amazon. You have to use their MP3 downloader, which I know annoys some of you. And you have to be in the USA. Sorry, Canoodlers.