Dreaming at the Edge of the Apocalypse

In my introductory blog post for North House Folk School, I described my work as the intersecting point between the three virtues of Craft, Land, and Play. It is through these same three lenses that I would like to share with you some of the projects I have been working on for the past three months of the Artisan Development Program. I will also be bringing these games to the Games Night Event at North House Folk School on January 2nd! I’ll see you there!

🪓 Craft: This is a set of Spellicans, which is an older word for the game of Pick-Up-Sticks. I carved them from splinters of Birch left over from other projects. Lauren Newby and Alex Blust carved a few sticks as well! They are colored with milk paint, and finished with tung oil.

🌱 Land: Even the smallest pieces of harvested wood can be used for play! Every bit of the tree can be made into something wonderful.

🏓 Play: If you haven't recently played a game of Spellicans, a.k.a. Pick-Up-Sticks, do yourself a favor and snap out a quick round. It is so compelling for such a simple game. When you're playing a game of Spellicans, and someone pulls off a delicate and fortuitous pick-up-stick maneuver, you can't help but cheer them on. It's a riot.

🪓 Craft: This is the game of Three Man's Morris, also known as Nine Holes, and is known to be at least a 4,000-year-old game. As you can see, I was experimenting with making bark canisters with Willow bark rather than Birch bark. I would say I was partially successful, and further research is needed.

🌱 Land: My home is in southern Minnesota, too south to have any Birch trees, so I don't have a regular supply of Birch bark. I do live near groves and groves of River Willow, however, which provides a fine strong bark as well! I was curious to try and apply the Birch bark canister techniques to the Willow bark, to make better use of the resources around me. Somehow there are always new craft frontiers to explore no matter where you look!

🏓 Play: Three Man's Morris is one of my all-time favorite games. It is very similar to Tic-Tac-Toe, except that each player only has three game pieces. Once all the pieces are used up, you and your opponent take turns moving your pieces around the board! It's got a bit more challenge and strategy than Tic-Tac-Toe but it's just as easy to learn and engaging for all ages.

🪓 Craft: During Family Weekend at North House, Anna Sharratt and I taught a kid's class on making Nine Man's Morris boards. The students stamped, decorated, and sewed their game boards, carved their game pieces, and made rope drawstrings for their game board bags! It was lots of fun, and the kids created some very wonderful objects.

🌱 Land: Our students foraged for some stone game pieces along the lakeshore, and carved other game pieces from locally harvested branches. I hope that they will go on to make more games and play objects from their local landscape. There is so much fun out in the world if only you know where to find it!

🏓 Play: Nine Man's Morris is similarly ancient to Three Man's Morris, but the game is a bit bigger and some more brain cells are needed to secure a victory. The game begins simply with an empty board, but quickly grows in complexity as pieces claim open sections. I can attest that entire lunch breaks have gone by without anyone touching their food because they were so locked in to a game of Nine Man's Morris!

🪓 Craft: This is a waxed canvas throwing football stuffed with Lauren Newby's sawdust and fletched with a spurt of wild-foraged feathers. The resemblance to a sweet potato was totally accidental.

🌱 Land: As I wrote about in my introductory blog post, one of my goals is to replace plastic toys with toys made from natural materials. Plastic is an incredibly useful material, but as we know, it is both toxic and environmentally harmful. Why bother making toys out of such a material when we have so many other durable, beautiful, and biodegradable materials at hand?

🏓 Play: This little guy flies straight and fast. Great for throwing at your friends when they're not looking (don't worry, sawdust is pretty soft).

🪓 Craft: Tops! Traditionally tops are made on a lathe, but I am usually more drawn to crafts that can be done with hand tools, good background music, and no electric bill, rather than the whirring of expensive motors. The top on the left is made of Birch, the top on the right is Pine, and both are brightly colored with milk paint.

🌱 Land: Like the Spellicans, these small tops were made from wooden pieces left over from larger projects. I do my best not to hoard offcuts - the eternal temptation of the woodworker - but I love to find fun in these little pieces. Twigs and billets that would be otherwise scrapped can find expression in little fidgets like these.

🏓 Play: What I've learned is that you shouldn't ever own just one top. It is essential that you spin two tops at a time, so they can battle.

🪓 Craft: This is a venerable old game known as Fox and Geese. In the early American colonies, people would often make this game from old lumber or off-cuts of siding planks. There are more elaborate boards in the world, of course, but I am drawn to this game's expression as a common folk craft.

🌱 Land: I made these geese game pieces from Curly Willow, an ornamental variety of Willow which grows in Dr. Seuss-esque curls and twists. This kind of tree has a tendency to sprout aggressively and lose many branches over the winter, and so it requires a great deal of pruning to keep healthy. This means that harvesting material does not come at the expense of the tree, but rather like shearing a sheep or cutting sweetgrass, trimming the extra material leads to further abundance in the future.

🏓 Play: Fox and Geese is a game of many-against-one. The geese can be eaten by the fox, but the fox can be trapped by the horde of geese. This game is a very effective teaching tool which demonstrates the power of teamwork, cooperation, and our multiplicative strength when we work together.

🪓 Craft: This Roman Bear Game set was experimental in many ways. I painted the board on the suede side of leather using walnut ink and elderberry ink from Erica Spitzer-Rasmussen's inkmaking class, a technique I had never tried before. It worked great. Some of the game pieces are bone, which I attempted to scrimshaw, also a new experience for me. The three standing pieces are kolrosed Maple, which were of course inspired by the kolrosing of Liesl Chatman. In kolrosing, too, I am a beginner.

🌱 Land: Both the Maple and bone for this game set were found in the local woods. Bone is a wonderful craft material, and often outlasts artificially manufactured materials. Bone becomes more burnished and seasoned with age, just as all good objects should be. A well-crafted bone tool or game piece can easily outlast its maker. What a wonder!

🏓 Play: This variation of the Bear Game, I'm sorry to say, is much too easily won. There are three hunters who pursue the bear around the board, but after showing the game to a few friends, I was distressed to discover that there is one strategy that wins every time. Luckily, there are many many many variations of the Bear Game, and rest assured I will be prototyping all of them.

🪓 Craft: During Winterer's Gathering this year, I had the opportunity to run two sessions of a game workshop. Folks came and played with all of the handcrafted game sets I've been making, and created their own game set to take home. We used linoleum prints to stamp game boards onto thick paper, which was folded into an envelope to hold the game pieces and rulebooks for a complete pocket-sized game set.

🌱 Land: While all of the materials for this activity were purchased, rather than harvested from the landscape, I am hopeful that the games we made at Winterer's Gathering will find their way into Duluth packs in the Boundary Waters, in hiking backpacks on the Superior Trail, and be passed around the campfire. Unplug from the digital world, fill your pockets with games, and get out into the wild green.

🏓 Play: I had a great time watching so many people enjoy so many fun games from so many countries. I brought my own handmade renditions of ancient and medieval games from Korea, England, China, West Africa, Ireland, Egypt, and more. Engaging with these global traditions of play can help us to embrace our common love of fun, and togetherness, and achieving absolutely crushing victories against your friends and family.

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If you knew what a Tree really was, you would lose your fucking mind.

The fact that you can read this sentence means you are still sane, and therefore, you have no idea what a Tree really is.

There is disagreement about the truth of Trees. The truth of Trees is deeper and wider than you know. However, don’t take any particular truth too seriously. But don’t dismiss any, either. Hold them all on different fingers, as leaves stretched towards the sun.

A friend of mine was told the truth about trees when he was very young when his grandfather took him into the woods. The grandfather walked right up to a little sapling Maple, hardly taller than my friend was at the time. “What is this?” asked his grandfather.

“A tree?” He had hardly spoken before his grandfather smacked the hat right off his head. His ears stung. He was dizzy. A good wallop.

“This is a person! This is a human being! And don’t forget it.” And he didn’t. And that’s what a Tree really is. For some.

Consider a hypothetical kind of vision in which you can only percieve the living cells of a creature. No dead skin or hair or nails, only the actively alive tissue. This kind of vision, let’s call it vivitography. If you could look at a person - a human person - a Homo sapien - and see only their living cells, see vivitographically, you would be freaked out.

Everyone would be bald, for starters. Hair is made from a filamentous protein that has no nucleus, no smooth endoplasmic reticulum, not even one Powerhouse of the Cell™️. So, if you could see only the living cells in a body, you couldn’t see hair. The same goes for nails and the enamel of teeth. Already this is looking like a horror movie: a creature with no hair or eyebrows or eyelashes, pulpy bone fragments instead of full teeth, fingers and toes that end in spongy and raw pink cuticle. Unfortunately that’s not even the worst part. The top layers of your skin are also dead flesh. If you could see vivitographically, all humans would look like horribly sunburned pink monkeys with the skin of a fresh-born mouse and the complexion of watermelon pulp. Much of our beauty, it turns out, depends on the fastidious care of our posthumous surfaces.

Let us say you use this same magical X-ray sight on a Tree. What would you see? Well, the bark is all dead skin. Sloughed-off boreal dandruff which the Tree uses as protection, and lichen uses as a home. So, with our special vivitographic vision, we do not see the bark. The same goes for the wood, as it turns out. Wood itself is not alive anymore. The growth rings of a Tree are active pores that allow the movement of water and sap, but they are not actively dividing cells. It’s all empty plumbing. What are we left with, then? Only the cambium. That paper-thin green layer between the bark and the wood is the only real living part of a Tree. In most species, the cambium is so thin that you can scrape it off with a fingernail. If you could see only the living aspect of a Tree, it would seem to be a massive, wet, green tube; hollow, terminating in a cloud of dancing leaves above and a riotous tangle of roots below. It would look for all the world like those freaky anemones at the petting portion of your local aquarium, which flinch their sticky tentacles at your touch. In one sense, that is what a Tree really is.

Consider this: New College in Oxford, England, founded in 1379, has on their campus a Great Hall. The hall is timbered with gigantic Oak beams. It was found that these great Oak beams, after 500 or so years of venerable service, were infested with beetles. They needed replacement. The problem was that Oaks of this size and stature hadn’t been growing in England for generations, as far as anyone knew. What were they to do? The dons and professors and exchequers searched far and wide, but could not find any Trees which would do. Finally - and you’d be forgiven for wondering what took so long - someone asked the College Forester. He had an answer. This man, responsible for the wild green land owned by the college (of which there is a fair portion), led a group of collegiate elite into the woods. There, he introduced them to a stand of massive, perfectly straight, 500-year-old Oaks. They had been planted by the original builders of New College hall 500 years previously to serve as replacements for just this purpose. When they were cut down and carved into shape and replaced, a new stand of Oaks were planted in their stead.

That’s a good story. Chew on that. Planting a Tree generations in advance for when it will be needed. And you know it’ll be needed because you know how wood behaves over the timespan of half a millenium because you live in a culture that has the beginnings of a grasp on these things. If you want to know what a Tree really is, you have to be okay thinking about hundreds and thousands of years at a time.

Consider Paul Bunyan. How tall he must have been! His shoes alone were as big as a house, big leather meteors crushing the ground on which he strode. A swing of his axe could clear a whole grove of Trees in one go. What must he have thought of Trees? He certainly didn’t replant them as he went. The story goes that he chopped down the whole forest that used to cover the center of the country and Babe the Big Blue Ox danced on all the stumps to knock them into the ground. Now, we call that place the prairie, and it stretches from Minnesota down to Texas. That beflanneled giant and his castrate bull Manifest Destiny’d their way across the continent, turning the forest to lumber and leaving the little people to turn the lumber into homes and churches and axe-handles and gallows – in other words, civilization. He was a terrible machine indeed. What must we think of him, now? Can we condemn a folktale for his part in the subjugation of a continent? I propose that instead we subject him to introgression.

Robin Wall Kimmerer writes about introgression in her essay, Corn Tastes Better on the Honor System. She writes that teosinte, the grassy and humble ancestor of corn, often sits at the edges of corn plantings. Through the genetic mixing of modern sweetcorn and the ancient grandfather alleles of teosinte, the modern corns remain biodiverse and genetically creative. They are reminded of their heritage. They are allowed to take a deep drink of ancient knowings. That is the biological process of introgression, and that is what Paul Bunyan needs a dose of.

They say Paul Bunyan met Babe the Big Blue Ox in a blizzard. This is the story told by Swedish and Norwegian loggers, recently arrived from their Nordic homelands. Back in the fjords, though, it was the ox who found the man.

In the beginning of all things, they say, there was indeed a blizzard. No day, no night, no moon, no sun, no Trees, no land, only wind and cold and dark dark darkness. Ice and frost were the only solid things in the world, and the only living thing in this endlesss winter storm was a cow named Auðumbla. (The letter ð, just so you know, is prounounced somewhere between a d and a th sound. Tap your tongue against your teeth and you’ll get it.) Auðumbla wandered, and licked the ice for sustenance, and wandered more. After time immeasurable, her endless thirsty licking uncovered a hair. Upon further tasting, the hair was revealed to be a part of a head, and so on, until the cow’s warm tongue thawed out a whole man. His name was Ymir, and Paul Bunyan is his shadow in the New World. Ymir and Auðumbla, gigantic beings, the first life in the universe, wandered in the cold.

Through the parthenogenic reproduction of which primordial gods are so fond, Ymir found himself in the company of three grandsons: Vili, Vé, and Odin. Yes, that very Odin of the one eye and floppy hat, though he was yet to lose the former or gain the latter. These three brothers killed their grandsire Ymir. It had to be done, you see, because with his gigantic body they built the world. His flesh became the soil, his bones the mountains. Each hair on his body blossomed into a Tree. A forest from a hairy patch of sacrificial skin! His skull became the dome of heaven, and the three gandsons threw Ymir’s eyes into the sky to become the sun and the moon. His blood, rivers. His brains, the clouds. You can imagine the rest. If you open an anatomy textbook in one hand and a geology textbook in the other you will see the truth of things: the Earth is a Body. How different Ymir is than his northwoods-logging descendant Paul! Don’t you think we might behave differently towards the living forest if our uberfauna predecessor was a self-sacrificing giant rather than an industrial logging machine? Our forests are not, as Paul would have you believe, the raw material for colonization. They are the living body of the primordial grandparent.

There. We have subjected Paul Bunyan to introgression. We have reminded him what his grandfather thinks a Tree really is.

The Lorax was wrong about trees. I don’t say that to be inflammatory, but the guy just didn’t have the whole picture. He spoke for the Trees, but the Trees will tell you themselves: they like to be cut. Trees have, as has been said, “a tendency towards immortality.” You’ve read Braiding Sweetgrass by now, right? You know that sweetgrass grows stronger and flourishes fertilitously when it is responsibly harvested. This is also true of Trees! A responsible harvest of wood and leaves and roots and twigs and bark ecnourages strong growth. This has been known by all boreal cultures since the beginning of time. A coppice - from which we get the word copse – is a Tree that has been chopped down in such a way that it will regrow from the stump. If you do not believe me, if you think this is some kind of logging propaganda or anti-forest rhetoric, ask the beavers. Go to a river which is abundant with whippy, springy Willow saplings. See what the beavers have done: they have cut down Willows everywhere you look, and the stumps from last year already have a vernal fireburst of new shoots exploding upwards. A fountain of green. Under the silty surface of the riverbank, the roots of these Willows crawl deeper, hold more soil, drink and purify more river water than they had before.

Let the record show that the Once-ler was also wrong, of course. His is the Paul Bunyan path: cut it all down, turn it into commodity, let the future crumble into ashes. Like so many conflicting dualities, the correct answer is not to choose a side but to reject the polarity of opposites and recognize that they are two sides to a more complex whole. The beaver, it turns out, is the synthesis of the now-reconcilable duality of the Lorax and the Once-ler. The beaver preserves the forest through the act of cutting it down. Ha! Do you see it now? What a Tree really is?

I promise you, the pastoral fantasy of the “untouched wilderness” is at best a misguided romanticization and at worst a mythic fantasy so decoupled from reality that following it may lead us to complete ecological collapse.

A grandfather says: a Tree is a human being.

A vivitographer says: a Tree is an armored green anemone.

Oxford says: a Tree is a 500-year commitment.

Paul Bunyan says: a Tree is the raw material of civilization.

Ymir says: a Tree is one of my hairs, which grows upon my flesh.

The Lorax says: a Tree must live.

The Once-ler says: a Tree must be cut.

Beaver says: a Tree must be cut to live.

This story, and many other wonderful essays and images, will soon be published in Gnostic Technology vol. 3

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Once, a long time ago, three brothers went out hunting. They carried bows and they traveled far. After a while, they saw a Great Blue Heron flying far overhead.

They shot their bows and brought down the great bird. As they approached, the Heron said to them, “Wait! If you will pull out your arrows and let me go free, I will grant you each a wish.” To the brothers, a wish was worth a great deal more than a bird, so they agreed.

The oldest brother said, “I wish to know all things, and to behold all things perfectly in my mind. I wish to imagine and understand all there is to imagine and understand.” And so, he pulled his arrow from the Heron and was immediately transformed into a Star - for a Star sees and knows all things.

The second brother said, “I wish to create anything I would like, with my own two hands. I wish to have all crafts at my command.” He too pulled out his arrow, and at once he was transformed into a great Tree - for all things can be made from a Tree.

The youngest brother was now alone with the Great Blue Heron. He looked up at the sky, at the Star which used to be his brother, and missed his companionship. He looked at the Tree which used to be his other brother, now a part of the forest, and missed him dearly. It broke his heart to think that his two brothers would live forever so far apart, one in Heaven, one on Earth.

And so, he decided his wish. He said, “I wish to be together with my brothers. I wish to walk between them and share their sorrows and their joys.” The youngest brother pulled his arrow from the Heron and was transformed into Lightning, which even now is the bridge between Heaven and Earth.

This story, and many other wonderful essays and images, will soon be published in Gnostic Technology vol. 3

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"The object isn't to make art, it's to be in that wonderful state which makes art inevitable." - Robert Henri

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Slow work. Hard wood.

A bit of gouging practice on some Pine, too.

Deepening the lines.

Smoothing the surface.

The board is feeling good. Now, for the pieces.

I have decided not to use the Ash branches for pieces, but rather, some beautiful snail shells from the river valley hills back home.

After a little wash, they're looking very fresh.

I also procured a good set of Kentucky Coffeebean seeds from the sidewalk a while back. I like their weight, and smoothness, and roundness. Perfect game pieces.

These snail shells are extremely fragile, so I'm filling them with wax to give a bit of weight and sturdiness. It seems to work!

In Fidchell, one person plays as Life, and the other as Death. I think a red squirmy blob emerging from a spiral shell is a suiting symbol for Life.

And there we have it. The board will need some further care - oiling, some decorative carving, and so on. But the game lives, and the month is over. Thanks for sticking around for it.

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"If a story lands immediately in your logic, if it is neatly trimmed and makes perfect sense, it's not really doing its work. Stories, old myths, do a kind of open-heart surgery on you." - Martin Shaw, interviewed in Emergence vol. 1

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"Play must serve no other purpose than itself, and the satisfaction it gives must be derived from participation in it alone." - Johan Huizinga, Homo Ludens

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I want to take my time with this project.

I'm taking it one step at a time, and moving slow.

The first thing I know I want to do is to create the game board by following the growth rings of the tree.

There is already a crack forming, as you can see, but it will actually fit in well with the game's design.

Every time I've played Fidchell, I am struck by how much is resembles the rings of an old tree. Finally I can see that vision become manifest.

I'm not sure what the pieces will look like, yet. They will have to be pretty small. I really like the twig-tips on Ash trees. They remind me of deer hooves.

Maybe I can use the twig-tips to decorate the pieces? They sort of look like Chess bishops to me!

Or, maybe something more abstract? I'll have some fun experimenting with pieces.

That's all for today. The game board lines are all etched in place. The rest of this Month Of Games has involved quick prototyping and small projects, but this Fidchell board deserves patience.

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"With a robber's hand. With a bull's strength. With the dignity of a judge. With keen ingenious wisdom." - The Instructions of King Cormac

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"Aillil and Maeve [King and Queen of Connaught] played fidchell after that, and Froech began to play with one of his own people. Beautiful his fidchell set: the board was of white gold, and the edges and corners were of gold, while the pieces were of gold and silver, and a candle of precious stone provided light." - from The Cattle Raid of Froech, as quoted by Nigel Suckling

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At last, we come to the grand finale, the game to end all games. Fidchell. The Druid's Game. The Game of Wood Wisdom.

My friend Mia is finishing her Craft Education Internship here at North House Folk School. Her capstone project is simple and brilliant: she has felled an old Ash tree, and has given pieces of the tree out to craftspeople in the community. Everyone is making something out of their piece, and all will be displayed in an exhibition together.

I went with her into the woods to meet the tree. And what a beautiful tree it is! I cut some branches that I will be using as game pieces. My friends had gone out earlier to cut this cookie to use as the game board.

The game I will be making is Fidchell. This game is from ancient Ireland, and appears in many legends, myths, and historical documents. A true Fidchell board has never been found, as far as anyone can tell. No pieces are known to exist. The details of the game are a mystery.

The games historian Nigel Suckling has done an incredible job reconstructing the game of Fidchell from historical sources and from his thorough research into Irish mythology, numerology, geography, and martial history. I love this game so, so much. I have written about Fidchell on my own website, I have written about the game in Gnostic Technology vol. 0 (p.70-75), and my friend Maeve Gathje and I teach a class on making Fidchell sets out of leather and wood. I teach Fidchell to friends at every opportunity. It is a beautiful game.

The way I sometimes describe Fidchell is "Go for Druids." I think the philosophical and tactical depth of the game is truly immense. Everyone plays differently. The board is always surprising. The game can turn on you unexpectedly at any time.

The mythology of the game of Fidchell is that it was used as an initiation tool for Druids, to teach each other wood wisdom. Indeed, in the ancient Irish language, the word "fidchell" translates as "wood wisdom". If you play well, you are wood wise. Fidchell is both the lesson and the test. Spend time in the woods to play a beautiful game. Learn to play a beautiful game in order to better understand your time in the woods.

This cookie unfortunately started splitting, so I'm wrapping it up as tight as possible with some cord in order to keep it from splitting more. I don't know if it will work, but we will try our best. The Fidchell game board resembles a cracking log, so perhaps the crack will fit in with the aesthetic of the board in some way.

I've wrapped up the cookie in layers of paper bags and wood shavings in order to slow down the drying process. Let's hope it works. I am very excited for this project - it feels like this whole month of handmade games has been practice for this climactic Game of Games.

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"Peredur came to the castle, and the castle gate was open. And when he reached the hall the door was open, and when he went inside he saw a gaming board in the hall, and either of the two sets of pieces was playing against the other, and the one to which he gave his help began to lose the game. And the other side gave a shout, just as if they had been men. Then he grew angry and took the set of pieces on his lap and threw the board in the lake." - The Magic Gaming Board (1100s), Welsh, as quoted by Nigel Suckling

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"The 'toy,' as it is understood in public debate and in Western culture in general, is above all a product of the adults' view of children, of physical objects, and of children in relation to physical objects." - Bo Lonnqvist, The Concept "Toy" and Cultural Research

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Today's post is mostly image-only. The first game: Mu-Torere, a Maori game from New Zealand.

I decided to make this game worm-themed. I love worms.

I'm considering the alternative game names "Squirmopoly" and "Dirt Chess".

The next game of today is a simple backboard. I'm picturing this as something to hang above a trash bin, so you can crumple up your worthless novel ideas and toss them in the bin.

I'm going for a Nerf vibe here. The hoop is a piece of basketry cane, so perhaps not the strongest material but we'll see how durable it is.

Buckets.

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"Few are altogether deaf to the preaching of pine trees. Their sermons on the mountains go to our hearts, and if people in general could be got into the woods, even for once, to hear the trees speak for themselves, all difficulties in the way of forest preservation would vanish." - John Muir, as quoted in Robert Macfarlane's Landmarks

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"One of the keys to magick is the use of the imagination. Imagination is a plastic medium. Giving form to our beliefs, it creates, supports and destroys the realities we believe. Imagination is an activity of the inner senses." - Jan Fries, Visual Magick

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We're back, to finish the Cube™️.

Today I experimented by mixing milk paint with a small bit of rawhide glue.

When I worked at Lakota Youth Development, I was told that parfleche paintings are traditionally made from a mixture of rawhide glue and earth pigments. It seems to work great, and the pigment feels more effectively fixed to the surface.

A quick finish with tung oil, which is also a new experiment for me. I like how thick and gobby it is. My usual oil is walnut oil, which tends to add a bit of a yellowish hue. Tung oil seems much more transparent. I dig it.

And a metal ring, so you never lose your Consequence Cube™️! Carry it with you on the go!

I had some moments of doubt with this one, but now I quite like it. Good colors and nice thick letters. Next time - if I make another - I'd like to try a heavier wood so it really clunks around when you give it a toss.

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"Laughing at the spirits is essentially a life-securing practice. Rather than being accidental to animism, laughter resides at the heart of it." - Rane Willerslev, Laughing at the Spirits in North Siberia

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"You need to crack open the mundane casing of ordinary technologies and trace their archetypal wiring. Then you might find yourself, if only for a moment, tapping into the electromagnetic unheimlich. The spirits speak: in the information age, you are never at home." - Erik Davis, TechGnosis

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Today's work is a simple extrapolation from the Decision Disc™️.

Sometimes answers aren't so easy as Yes or No.

In a given situation, for example, you may need to proceed with caution, but proceed nonetheless.

You also might need to bring your carving outside to enjoy the crisp fall night and crackling fire.

October has been a treat so far.

I feel lucky to be here, making such silly things.

This project doesn't feel quite done. It needs some color.

But it sure works. I feel the cognitive load dissipating as we speak.

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"We may be on the verge of a massive shift in how we view time, causality, and information. Classical causality, the one-thing-after-another billiard-ball world of Isaac Newton and his Enlightenment friends, is being revealed as folk causality, a cultural construct and a belief system, not the way things really are." - Eric Wargo, Time Loops

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"The self is not something ready-made, but something in continuous formation through choice of action." - John Dewey

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You know what a demake is, yes? Remaking video games on older, more primitive hardware? For example: Halo for Atari 2600, No Man's Sky for pico8, Guitar Hero for the NES.

I love demakes. What an engaging idea! Simplifying a complex game experience is a compelling creative constraint. What do you keep? What do you ignore? Which mechanics are necessary to the game experience? Which aesthetic elements recall the original game most precisely?

Let's regress even further! Why not demake a video game all the way back to pen and paper? Which essential elements of a game experience can be regressed all the way back to analog materials?

Demaking games, as far as I know, exists exclusively within the medium of video games. Why couldn't we demake analog games, too?

This is very similar to the idea of folkification, which I've written about before. To summarize: folkification is the act of making something more accessible and less industrialized. Cooking your own meals rather than buying frozen food is folkification. Learning to mend your clothes rather than buying new is folkification. Folkification is a resistance against planned obsolescence, consumerism, and unskilled dependence on the product economy.

To folkify a game would mean to remake a game using your own skills and materials. A board game like Tic-Tac-Toe is already completely folkified. Anyone can play it on a napkin. Nobody owns the intellectual property of Tic-Tac-Toe. People have made Tic-Tac-Toe game sets from every material imaginable from wood to wool. In contrast, a board game like Settlers of Catan is not very folkified. You couldn't sketch out a quick Catan board on a napkin. Making your own Catan set from scratch would require printing cards, stamping dice, cutting map pieces, etc. However, and this is important, everything is vulnerable to folkification.

Settlers of Catan actually does have a strong folkification community. People have made their own sets using laser cutters, 3D printers, and min wax wood stains, to name a few. What would it mean to engage the process of folkification towards a game like Monopoly, or Pokémon, or... Beyblades? These intellectual properties have weird lore and complex game systems and detailed parts and pieces.

Well, I'd start by making my own tops. Then maybe I'd start bashing them against each other to see who wins. Then I might teach my friends to make tops, too, and start to tell legends of the mightiest centrifugal warriors...

You get the idea. What will you folkify?

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"All learning begins when our comfortable ideas turn out to be inadequate." - John Dewey

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"The oracles stand at the meeting-point between the individualistic, unpredictable, and sometimes anti-social behavior of the shaman and the responsible social functions of the priest." - Nigel Pennick, Secret Games of the Gods (1989)

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In today's fast-paced modern world, you don't have time to make decisions.

You're working! You're raising a family! You're wondering where your next meal is going to come from now that food assistance programs are interminably terminated!

With all these heavy problems on your mind, you don't have time to be weighing options. You couldn't be expected to have the mental capacity to consider consequences!

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Should I quit my job? Should I be vegetarian? Do I love her? Am I a starchild? Is my children learning?

Just toss the Decision Disc™️ in the air, and get your answer! As easy as that, you have offloaded the impossible, overbearing work of thinking about your life.

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Order your Decision Disc™️ today and never think again!

⭐⭐⭐

"Large Language Models authoritatively state things that are incorrect because they have no concept of right or wrong. I believe that the writers, managers and executives that find it exciting do so because it gives them the ability to pretend to be intelligent without actually learning anything, to do everything they can to avoid actual work or responsibility for themselves or others." - The Hater's Guide to the AI Bubble

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"Never try to convey your idea to the audience - it is a thankless and senseless task. Show them life, and they'll find within themselves the means to assess and appreciate it." - Andrei Tarkovsky

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Apologies for my absence. I took a short trip to Duluth to support my ultramarathon-running friend. He ran 62 miles (!!!) in 16.5 hours, which, to me, is a breathtaking accomplishment. Most of those miles followed the course of the Superior Hiking Trail, which can be a gnarly mess of roots and rocks and slippery fresh-fallen leaves. I'm immensely proud of him.

Back to business. And by business, I mean play. Remember the Nine Man's Morris boards I made the other night? Well, they were for a kids' class.

Our students sewed their boards together, stamped them with wooden stamps they carved themselves, and made their own playing-pieces out of wood and stone.

It worked out wonderfully, the kids had a great time, and now there are six more Morris boards in the world!

On to game number two! I was throwing around that little yellow shuttlecock the other day with friends, and someone mentioned how excellent the simple game of Catch can be. All present were in agreement. So, today's mission was to make the most catchable and throwable ball.

If you take the overlap of two equally-sized circles spaced so that the center of one is on the edge of the other, you get the shape in green here. If you cut out four of those and sew them together, it makes a perfect sphere.

So, my thought was to make something a little more football-shaped by narrowing the pattern. This yellow shape is an attempt at flattening the spherical pattern into something more footballey.

All sewn together and stuffed with sawdust, it looks amazingly like a yam.

I was really going for a Nerf football kind of thing here, you know?

Coulda gone to state.

Okay, a second try: a shape that is a little bigger, and a rounded front end for more whomp and less whizz.

Sort of an egg-ish profile going on here which I really like. It even stands up straight when you set it on the table.

Now With More Fletching™️! This actually flies great, and it feels good to catch too. A winner! Perhaps I'll make a whole set? It was fun to sew the feathers into the seams on this one. Much to experiment with later.

Okay, on to the third and final project for today! This is a game from R.C. Bell's endlessly rich book, Old Board Games. This game is particularly interesting to me because pieces have to jump over other friendly pieces to capture enemy pieces. So, to win, players have to set up a sort of leapfrog attack formation.

I split some lovely fresh Pine this morning, and flattened out the faces with my carving axe.

I'm always surprised by how many games like this are in the world. A square grid, black and white pieces, and a couple simple rules for movement and (sometimes) capture. There seem to be infinite variations on that basic idea all over the world and from all points in history.

Chess, Checkers, Go, Fidchell, Hnefatafl, Pong Hau K'i, Three Man's Morris, Nine Man's Morris, Tic-Tac-Toe, Fox and Geese... and those are just the ones you've probably heard of. There's zillions.

I've been playing with a lot of chip-carving lately. Especially making these little triangles. Once you get the hang of it, it's hard to stop.

Boom! I played a little game on my own, and it was indeed an interesting mechanic to leapfrog my own people in order to attack.

In case you're wondering, I did win the game against myself.

Thanks for sticking with me, and I hope you stick around til the end.

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"The first expressions of love take the form of play: the secret exchange of glances, dancing, the interplay of thoughts and emotions, the yielding of partners to each other. In Sanskrit, the union of lovers is called kridaratnam, 'the jewel of games.'" - Manfred Eigen and Ruthild Winkler, Laws of the Game: How the Principles of Nature Govern Chance (1975)

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"We believe that while our society is in a transitional stage between the destruction of an old order and the introduction of a new order, the creators of beauty must turn their work into clear ideological propaganda for the people, and make art, which at present is mere individualist masturbation, something of beauty, education and purpose for everyone." - Manifesto of the Union of Mexican Workers, Technicians, Painters and Sculptors (1922)

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Today I taught a make-your-own sewing kit class with Anna Sharratt at North House Folk School. It was a massive success, I fear.

Tomorrow, Anna and I are teaching a second class: Nine Man's Morris. This game is of a similar vintage to Three Man's Morris, but is engagingly complex to a higher degree.

Tonight, I'm preparing the game boards. The game boards will also be small bags that will hold the game pieces!

It's very fun to bring games like this back into cultural awareness. This is especially rewarding when working with kids, because they aren't concerned with the archaeological nature of this fossil-game. They know it's fun and that's what matters.

Tomorrow we'll sew and decorate these boards, carve some pieces, and collect some lake stones to use for the game.

Anyone can make a Nine Man's Morris board, and anyone can learn to play.

⭐⭐⭐

"WE LIVE in a new era, of unforeseen poetic intensity." - Yellow Manifesto (1928)

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"The mill game, a pastime of ancient origin, was widely spread not only in European contexts but also in further areas. Despite this, it was known to have had a major development mostly in medieval Europe. Game boards engraved on stone or on other materials, pictorial representations, and mentions in written documentation testify the popularity achieved by the mill game over the centuries." - Lester Lonardo, Pastimes in the Life of a Castle: Archaeological Evidences of the Mill Game in Southern Italy

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Tomorrow, me and my friend Anna Sharratt are teaching a group of kids how to make a small sewing kit.

We are going to decorate our sewing kits with some embroidery, and that's where today's game comes in.

You'll remember the game of Three Man's Morris from 14 days ago, of course. One of many games in the genre of Mill Games.

This game is etched into cathedral pews and scratched into floorboards all over Europe.

Though I'm not certain, I have a strong intuition that this game was embroidered at least once in history. It's such an easy pattern and would be such an easy game to play on a pincushion.

I feel that it is partly my mission to hide games in plain sight.

Hide play in common places.

I encourage you to do the same.

Thanks for sticking around for this short little project. I'll see you tomorrow.

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"In conclusion, although nowadays the mill game is a niche hobby on the brink of oblivion, it can be considered one of the most practiced games between the Middle Ages and the Modern period [...] Its fortune and popularity were due not only to the easy rules and the simplicity in making pieces and crafting the game board, but also because it was a game of ingenuity that could often lead to gambling." - Lester Lonardo, Pastimes in the Life of a Castle: Archaeological Evidences of the Mill Game in Southern Italy

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"Creativity is for the gifted few: the rest of us are compelled to live in environments constructed by the gifted few, listen to the gifted few's music, use the gifted few's inventions and art, and read the poems, fantasies, and plays by the gifted few. This is what our education and culture conditions us to believe, and this is a culturally induced and perpetuated lie." - Simon Nicholson, The Theory of Loose Parts

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Today's game is more of an activity than a true game.

I've been calling this technique jugglebraiding, and I found out about this activity during my journey to recreate the medieval Hood of Skjoldehamn. Since then, I've made dozens of jugglebraids during many different craft classes.

Jugglebraiding creates a strong and beautiful cord that is handy for all kinds of things - including drawstrings for bags, as you can see!

You can sing songs while you jugglebraid, or turn it into a more competitive game by racing to see what pair of braiders can make the fastest and neatest rope. Every pair of kids that I've introduced to jugglebraiding has been fully engaged in the fun of the craft.

I'm not entirely pleased with my jugglebraid setup so far, and I suspect that there is an easier way to braid. I was inspired by the spinning-stick that my colleague Mathilde Lind and I made together (pictured above). It holds a big bundle of yarn without complaint and can wind or unwind cordage easily.

This will be the top stick, which hangs from a handy rafter to anchor the four jugglebraid cords.

I'm wanting to make each of the four handles out of a heavy bottom and a forked top, as you can see. The bottoms, I hope, will add weight, while the forked tops will hold yarn in the same way that the spinning-stick does.

I haven't found a historical example of these jugglebraid setups anywhere. I'm just bumbling through, denial and error style.

I gotta believe that there were songs or dances associated with making these braids. Ropemaking is historically a multi-person activity all over the world. When folks get together and do rhythmic crafts together, they can't help but make it fun.

This Birch I'm using is quite fresh. This means, unfortunately, that I won't be able to entirely finish this project today. I'll have to let the pieces sit and dry for a while, at least overnight, if not longer.

These are definitely objects that need some color, and paint can only be applied to dry wood. Otherwise it gets gross and weird.

As a bonus for today, the Oware/Mancala board from 11 days ago is finally dry and ready for oil!

Yowee!! Look at that Birch shine!

See you tomorrow for more!

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"Sat against a tree, Eve sat against me, thinkin' 'bout what it is to be." - Freek Wallagh, Release from Eden (published in Fenris Wolf vol. 12)

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"All his best years of active life had been spent in the care and guardianship of trees. [...] He could not live for long away from them without a strange, acute nostalgia that stole his peace of mind and consequently his strength of body. A forest made him happy and at peace; it nursed and fed and soothed his deepest moods. Trees influenced the sources of his life, lowered or raised the very heart-beat in him." - Algernon Blackwood, The Man Whom The Trees Loved (1912) (pdf) (audio)

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Today is an experiment with color.

I recently took Erica Spitzer Rasmussen's inkmaking class, and I was extremely inspired by the brilliant yellow color that we made by mixing turmeric powder and isopropyl alcohol. She told us that we could make lots of other colors using alcohol infusions. That's all the permission I needed - so, today, I bought a 12-pack of little pint jars, a bunch of bottles of 90% rubbing alcohol, and got busy.

I'm going to let these sit for a while, and make some wooden blocks to dye.

I'm going to make a zillion of these little blocks. They're great for using up scrap pieces that otherwise I'd just burn.

This abundance of little pieces is an activity informed by the Reggio Emilia approach to education. After World War II, the city of Reggio Emilia was rubble.

Parents and families got together in the city to rebuild and to start teaching their children again. They used the scattered bricks and broken lumber of their city as teaching tools. Children were allowed to be creative and encouraged to grow into that creativity.

There's a lot more to the Reggio Emilia approach than just this idea of "loose parts play," and I encourage you to look further into the history. Loris Malaguzzi's idea of the Hundred Languages of Children vibrates with the volatility of truth.

These blocks I soaked in turmeric ink, and look at the color! Wow!

These next ones I soaked in wild grape and elderberry ink. BAM!

I tried two more experiments with blue milk paint and za'atar alcohol ink, but they were pretty devoid of pigment.

There is much more to be discovered here! Three cheers for experimentation and play!!!

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"The wonder that lies hidden in our own souls lies also hidden, I venture to assert, in the stupidity and silence of a mere potato." - Algernon Blackwood, The Man Whom The Trees Loved (1912) (pdf) (audio)

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We interrupt your month of handmade games with an important announcement!

This blog post was written by me for North House Folk School, at which I am currently one of four Resident Artisans. Please enjoy. Your regularly-scheduled month of handmade game posts will continue as usual.

My name is Jake Fee, I am one of the four Artisans in Development at North House Folk School this year, and I would like to introduce myself in the form of a diagram.

fig. 1

The three cardinal directions of purpose for me this year are Craft, Play, and Land. These three concepts, and the intersections between them, are central to my work as a craft educator.

fig. 2

Craft! I was only tangentially aware of the traditional craft universe before I became a North House Craft Education Intern in 2020. During that year, I was introduced to blacksmithing, spinning, crocheting, bread baking, spooncarving, rosemaling, kolrosing, boatbuilding, timber framing, axework, embroidery, sprang, felting, dyeing, basket weaving, and the rest of the overflowing abundance of craft knowledge here on campus. Since then, I've taught basketry classes, woodcarving classes, nålbinding and spinning and sewing classes, workshops on making automata, and I've even given a lecture on the wonders of willow. Craft inspires me in the morning and keeps me up late at night.

fig. 3

Everything comes from the Land. I grew up in southern Minnesota, near the convergence of the Blue Earth and Minnesota rivers. Our waterways are polluted and sticky, and they are also beautiful, and rich, and when the sun rises over the misty water I am proud of my home. I have been inspired by Ruth Goodman, Robert MacFarlane, Robin Wall Kimmerer, William Bryant Logan, Alexander Langlands, and others who write and think about the entangled relations between the human species and the terrestrial landscape. If I may tip into the genre of manifesto for a moment: it seems clear to me that the earth is crying out for us to return to our role as stewards. The pastoral myth of "leave no trace" and the post-industrial desire for "untouched wilderness" has done us and our non-human relations great harm. It is imperative that we get back in the woods. It is imperative that we learn to make things out of our local natural resources. It is imperative that we learn the names of the plants and animals again. To me, the land is the source of all goodness, all prosperity, all joy. To be in service to the land is the highest calling.

fig. 4

Play is the best way to learn! I don't think it's an exaggeration to say that games teach us the ways we can exist in the world. I've always had a fascination with games of all kinds - card games, P.E. games, video games, board games, kid's games, drinking games, camp games, party games, solstice games, surrealist games, role-playing games, and most recently, handmade games. When I was a kid, I would invent elaborate board games, and as I was (and remain) an only child, my dear patient parents would have to play them with me. I thank them for their service. Part of my work this year is to develop several toys and games made of all-natural craft materials. I agree with Johan Huizinga: "Play cannot be denied. You can deny, if you like, nearly all abstractions: justice, beauty, truth, goodness, mind, God. You can deny seriousness, but not play."

fig. 5

At the intersection of Craft and Land is where we find that most North-Housian word: Slöjd. I have done my best to define my understanding of slöjd elsewhere, but for the purposes of introducing myself today, I will summarize: slöjd, to me, is craft that is directly sourced from the local landscape. When I bring students out to the riverbank to cut willow for baskets, that is slöjd. When I chop down a birch sapling to make into coathooks for my room, that is slöjd. When my friend gives me wool from her sheep who eat the local grass, that's slöjd. When you take your friends out to the woods to whittle trees into chair parts, that's slöjd. When my friends trim their apple trees and give me the twigs so I can carve weird little faces, that's definitely slöjd. Through craft we find an intimacy with the land that is not achievable through other means. Slöjd, to me, is an active dependence on the land for materials. I wasn't any good at identifying trees until I started carving wood. I didn't know a dandelion from poison ivy until I learned to forage snacks from the prairie. Slöjd, for me, is that bridge from land-ignorance to land-belonging.

fig. 6

When Land meets Play, there is Adventure. I've been a camp kid since I was old enough to hold a paddle, and it has brought me great spiritual nutrition throughout my life. I've been a camper at YMCA Camp Patterson, YMCA Camp Ihduhapi, and YMCA Camp Menogyn, a camp counselor, a river guide, a certified Wilderness First Responder, and a very dedicated backyard wanderer. I love to be out in the green, and I love to bring friends and students with me.

fig. 7

Craft and Play come together quite easily. This is the work and the power of the Kringle, which every day I seek to fulfill. Kris Kringle, also known as Santa Claus, also known as Saint Nick, is my guiding light in this realm. He is famous, of course, for making handmade games and toys and other diversions out of natural materials. All over the world, there are such wonderful traditions of handmade toys and games, from African mancala boards to Mayan corn-husk dolls to Lakota plum-pit games to Viking-Age chess. These days, you'd be lucky to find a toy that is both biodegradable and durable. Kids grow out of toys (and clothes!) way too fast to justify making toys or games out of something so eternally-undecomposable as plastic. It is also empowering for young people to learn to make their own fun! I loved teaching the Handmade Games Camp at North House this summer. Kids walked away with jump ropes, wrestling sticks, juggling balls, board games, throwing darts, and more, all made by their own two hands out of locally-harvested materials and ready to throw in the compost bin whenever the fun fades out.

fig. 8

Craft, Land, Play, Slöjd, Adventure, and the Kringle. This is the constellation of stars I will be following this year. That's my work.

You can find more of Jake Fee on his website, on Instagram, and on Bluesky.

"Rule 4: Consider everything an experiment." - Immaculate Heart College Art Department Rules

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Today we're gonna make a whizzer!

I made this rawhide whizzer at Lakota Youth Development under the wise guidance of Mike Marshall.

The lore is that whizzers train your bow muscles! You can feel it after whizzing for a while - those forearms get a workout.

I want to make my own from a piece of Birch wood. It'll be heavier, and probably give a beefier whiz.

This is a traditional and indigenous craft. I learned it from Mike, a Lakota craftsman.

I wouldn't ever want to teach this project, or sell it. It's not mine to pass on. But I do want to play with the idea and have fun making one myself.

There are lots of crafts which are shared across cultures, and can be really interesting to explore as traditions which connect us. Coracles in Ireland and Wales are made almost exactly the same by Lakota people, who call them Bull Boats.

Every culture and people have a tradition of some kind of basketry. Baskets are an amazing connection that we all share, indigenous to all lands.

Unlike boats and baskets and beading and buckskin, there's no tradition as far as I know in my own genealogy of making whizzers like this. This is an exploration, for me, as someone outside of this particular toy tradition.

My carving has been inspired by Jogge Sundqvist's latest book, Karvsnitt. I admit I haven't actually bought the book yet, but I do steal a peek every time I walk past a copy in the North House school store.

Karvsnitt is all about carving surface texture by using techniques such as chip carving. As you can probably see, I'm also still thinking about those Celtic knots from before. The trefoil design of this disc was supposed to invoke a Celtic-ish vibe.

So, I'm working towards some interesting textures with this one. Bit by bit our hands get smarter.

Thanks for whizzing with me today. As expected, this thing RIPS. See you tomorrow.

⭐⭐⭐

"Rule 7: The only rule is work. If you work it will lead to something. It's the people who do all of the work all the time who eventually catch on to things." - Immaculate Heart College Art Department Rules

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"The most difficult thing is to know what we do know, and what we do not know." - P.D. Ouspensky, Tertium Organum (1922)

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I was in the woods yesterday.

Today, to atone for my unfortunate absence, I have made two small toys. One for yesterday, and one for today.

I saw a drawing of a design for a shuttlecock (you know, like for badminton?) that was simply a knob of wood with a bunch of feathers stuck in.

That seemed simple enough, but I also wanted to try and see if I could use my new alcohol-turmeric ink to color the wood.

I made this ink in Erica Spitzer Rasmussen's Old-School Inks class at North House Folk School. This ink was made from turmeric powder and isopropyl alcohol. We also made inks from grapes, elderberries, walnuts, charcoal, and indigo. It was incredible. I'm inspired to make more.

I found that the turmeric ink was not suitable for writing, as it spread out very quickly and was not viscous enough to hold the shape of letters. However, it seems perfect for dyeing wood a bright and brilliant gold!

I think this little thing would be great if a fella had a pair of paddles to knock it around with. For now, it's a surprisingly aerodynamic toy for playing catch.

Part Dieux of today's craft adventure is making a Buttonhole Puzzle, also known as a Nålbinding Puzzle. This one is dead simple, and anyone can make one, and it Nerd Snipes the heck out of people.

First, you need a needle. A nålbinding needle is best. Bigger than a darning needle. They can be quite long, but this one is a shortie.

Then, you tie a wee string through the eye of the needle. It is critically important that the string is shorter than the needle, and does not stretch!

The trick with this puzzle is that the needle is stuck inside a buttonhole. It seems simple to detach, but it isn't!

Everyone's first instinct is to pull the string around the needle, but since the string is just a wee bit too short, it doesn't work. So, how does it work? I'll show you, but only you, and you have to promise not to tell anyone. Okay? Watch closely.

⭐⭐⭐

"He had said that the geometry of the dream-place he saw was abnormal, non-Euclidian, and loathsomely redolent of spheres and dimensions apart from ours." - The Call of Cthulu, H.P. Lovecraft (1928)

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"It's not about what it is, it's about what it can become." - Dr. Seuss, The Lorax

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The act of making an object can also be experienced as a long prayer to the earth.

Many living things gave up their life-energies for this simple little project. Birch gave the wood. Sheep gave the wool.

Hemp gave the rope. Cow gave the milk that made the milk paint. Pigments from the stones of the earth made the milk paint, too.

Walnut gave the nuts which were pressed into the oil that sealed the wood, now safe from injury and moisture.

Experienced this way, there are a host of souls hovering around every crafted object. A chorus of lives that are permanently refracted by the thing you hold in your hands.

What a joy it is, to make something with living materials. What a punishment it can be, to use plastic, petroleums, extractions, expulsions, refinements of hardship and labor.

I encourage you to consider which ghosts might haunt the objects you own. Are your clothes, for example, harboring ghouls of nylon, industry, and petroleum infrastructure? Or nixies and ents of well-nourished fibers?

Thwack! 🪓🪵

Thanks for sticking with me. I'll be in the woods tomorrow, so I'll hit you with a double-header on Sunday.

⭐⭐⭐

"Although it is true that we are moral creatures in an amoral world, the world's amorality does not make it a monster. Rather, I am the freak." - Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

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"Divination can be accomplished by assigning qualities, values and meaning to almost any set of objects, natural or artificial." - Nigel Pennick, Secret Games of the Gods (1992)

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Today's project is a puzzle. I bought a version of this puzzle from a guy at a fair.

It was mostly plastic and paracord, but the puzzle is really interesting, and I want to make a version out of nicer materials.

The version I bought at the fair consisted of two rings rather than an axe and stump (as you can see in my drawing above). I chose to make this puzzle into an axe-and-stump-themed toy because it clarifies the purpose of the puzzle, which is to bring those two objects together on the same loop of rope.

There are some really incredibly-made blacksmith puzzles out there, but I've never seen rope knot puzzles made with the same care. Most wood-and-rope puzzles are paracord and cheap wood.

I've collected a plump arena board of these sorts of puzzles. The title of the arena board, "Nerd Snipers," comes from the xkcd comic about paralyzing nerds by giving them interesting puzzles. I love handing over these kinds of knot puzzles to people and watching them freeze in place while they untangle the riddle.

I remember reading about a tradition - I forget where and when - of mothers carrying scissors on their belts. The scissors were tied with a special knot that was, in fact, a puzzle. If you knew the trick, you could quickly untangle the scissors and take them off the loop.

Little kids couldn't figure out the trick, of course. So when they wanted to use the scissors, they had to stand right next to mom and use the scissors tied to her belt.

Once the children were old enough, however, they would eventually figure out the trick of it. Once they solved the riddle, they were old enough to have their own pair of scissors.

I love a riddle like that. It's a little initiation, a miniature rite of passage!

I think the story of the Gordian Knot is the same kind of thing. Alexander the Great came to Phrygia, in which there was the legend of the Gordian Knot: whosoever could untie this legendary knot would become ruler of all of Asia.

Well, of course, Alexander cut through the knot with his sword, and since then generations of unimaginative men have praised his decisive action.

Of course, Alexander missed the point entirely. In untying the riddle of the knot, he would have discovered the secret of the thing. He might have even proved himself wise, and worthy of rulership.

But no. Instead, he cut the damn thing open and the world was deprived of a sacred mystery.

I'm going to let this paint dry overnight, and finish this lumberjack puzzle tomorrow.

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"In games, as in life, the purpose of information is to influence choice. If you have no choice, there's not much point in being informed." - David Parlett, Oxford History of Board Games

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"Every new participant in a culture both enters into an existing context and simultaneously changes that context. Each new speaker of its language both learns the language and alters it. Each new adoption of a tradition makes it a new tradition." - James P. Carse, Finite and Infinite Games

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Today we're making the old dive bar classic, Hook & Ring.

I have been thinking about the nature of games during this month-long marathon of game-making. I've been thinking about how games always impose a limitation on the player.

Every game rule is a restriction of choice, action, knowledge, or awareness. There are hidden cards, boundaries to stay inside, objects to avoid, turn orders you must follow. Look at the language in a game rulebook: the player must, the next player will, the pawn moves, the king dies. The language of rules is imperative. Commanding.

Like this Hook & Ring game, for example: to win, you have to get the hook on the ring. You could, if you wanted to, cut the rope with a scissors, or pull the hook out of the wall, or anything. But the true rules of the game impose a limitation. To play the game is to accept restriction.

As far as I know, there are no games (yet) which involve rules beyond the capabilities of the players. The goalkeeper must remain hovering 3 inches above the ground at all times! Wouldn't that be odd? No, every kind of game constricts the mind and the body. If the game is a good one, the constriction is engaging and interesting and is worth the temporary absolution of total freedom to act as thou wilt.

Life often feels like a game. Fill out this form! Wait your turn in line! Collect colored paper to win! Daily life often follows game logic, as if we are little pewter characters doing loops around the streets of our towns, collecting grocery and money tokens. Rules and limitations.

I think a freedom comes to you when a situation can be seen as a game. The rules of the situation are only limiting you, never empowering you. There is a secret alternative to following the rules: you can always flip the table. Even if you never take that choice, it is always available to you. That knowledge is powerful. Don't forget you can always sweep the pieces off the board and end the game right there.

See you tomorrow.

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"An immortal soul is a person who cannot help but continue living out a role already scripted." - James P. Carse, Finite and Infinite Games

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"God does not play dice with the universe." - Albert Einstein

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Today we're making a single die.

There are lots of games that involve dice, and the idea of a dice roll is very old. Randomness is found in some of the very oldest games, like the Egyptian game of Senet and the Mesopotamian Royal Game of Ur. Some games use a handful of sticks as a random number generator. Other games use bones.

Historically, the knucklebones of sheep or other domesticated animals were made into dice very easily. They work pretty much out of the box (or, more accurately, out of the ungulate). They can also be carved into more equilateral shapes.

It's my understanding that dice were not always seen as random, at least not the way we think of it today. To a modern mind, true randomness is totally unshackled to any force or influence. A dice roll should be equally probably on all sides, if it is a fair die.

This isn't a totally common perception, if you look through all the time and space human beings have been playing with randomness. Some people say spirits play games along with you. Some say Fate or Fortune smiles or frowns upon you, depending upon your Piety or Luck. These aren't metaphors for randomness. There is a common and true belief in the supernatural power of dice to reveal the wishes of the Other World.

I also love to play psychic games with dice. All you have to do is guess a number, and give it a roll. If you're right, you're on the right track, and Fortune is smiling upon you. If not, try again.

Roll some bones. Throw your Fate into the hands of the spirits.

See you tomorrow.

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"For the true heavens are everywhere, even where you stand and walk. If your spirit grasps the innermost birth of God and penetrates the sidereal and fleshy birth then it is already in heaven." - Jakob Boehme

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"Today we live in a world where you may ultimately lose your teaching job to a robot, but you have the opportunity for exploration and expression of topics and people which would have got you burned at the stake a few centuries ago." - Gordon White, The Chaos Protocols

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Yesterday's project is dry, and today's project is a simple one.

You could absolutely make a game set of Martian Tic-Tac-Toe yourself out of any oddments or notions you have laying around. The set I'm making today will be made from stones I found during my sunrise beach trip the other day, during which I also procured my set of Mancala pebbles.

Here's the story of this game: during the first archeological expeditions to Mars, pyramidal game pieces were found in many different locations.

The game was reconstructed by Andrew Looney (yes, that's really his real name), and it is amazing.

The game was called Icehouse and it became extremely popular on this planet too. Andrew Looney's small, plastic, multicolored pyramids were mass-produced and reached a wide audience of game nerds.

Players were inspired by the new game pieces and started making their own games that used the Icehouse pyramids.

Today, they are known as Looney Pyramids, and there are hundreds of completed games to play with them.

Just like a deck of cards, the same pocket-sized set of game pieces can be used for a huge amount of games. Some games are quick and breathless, some games are long and complicated. Martian Tic-Tac-Toe is simple to learn but mind-bending to play.

The game works like this: each player has three pyramids. One small, one medium, and one large.

In my version, I'm using stones. The small stone has a dot, the medium stone has a dot and a ring, and the large stone has a dot with two rings.

The first player places their small stone first. Anywhere on the table. The second player follows, and places their small stone adjacent to the first player's stone. You have to imagine a Tic-Tac-Toe board on the table, but it's only imaginary.

Play continues. Players place their pieces in order: small, medium, large. Here's the twist. After all your pieces are on the table, play begins again with the small piece. You move your small piece to a new, open position on the Tic-Tac-Toe board. As long as the three-by-three imaginary game board is preserved, you can move your pieces to any open spot on that 3x3 board!

Remember, the game has to continue in the same order until someone gets a three-in-a-row. Small, medium, large. So you know what piece your opponent is going to move next! Pretty interesting, and an odd twist on something like Three Man's Morris.

Try it out. It's a fun game, and easy to bring anywhere.

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"[Play] is an all-absorbing, satisfying, and wholesome activity with opportunity for doing, thinking, feeling, and becoming. Its spirit is joyous, yet serious and purposeful. Play's primary contribution is the provision for more abundant living." - Carl A. Troester, Everyday Games for Children (1950)

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"A game is a series of interesting choices." - Sid Meier

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I have a new toy today. A camera stand.

You're going to be on the receiving end of some truly incredible cinematography today.

A few weeks ago I harvested some Birch saplings and made them into a gigantic set of Pick-Up-Sticks.

(red Fractal-Tac-Toe game for scale)

I was going to bust out the Pick-Up-Sticks for the Unplugged event at North House Folk School, but it got rained out, and the festivities moved indoors.

Right now, the sticks are simple naked wood, but I'd like to give them a little more character by painting them. That's today's project.

I did bring a set of Pick-Up-Sticks to another event on campus - to the Solstice festivities. The branches I brought were Willow, which is straighter and less branchy, but softer and less durable over time.

The game was, surprisingly, a huge hit. Everyone knows how to play Pick-Up-Sticks, and everyone was up for the challenge of using hugemongous sticks for the game.

The only people that didn't know the rules were wee small kids. I saw some really wonderful moments where grandmas and grandpappies taught their little young ones how to caaaaaarefully lift up a stick just so.

And those young ones really loved watching the sticks closely, and catching grandma when her stick accidentally bumped another!

I found a real joy in facilitating those intergenerational moments.

I also made a small bow and arrow set, complete with a birchbark target, and I saw lots of parent-child teams working the bow together. It was really beautiful to witness.

I'm using milk paint to color these Pick-Up-Sticks. Milk paint is made from natural earth pigments mixed with casein, a sticky protein extracted from milk. Milk paint is nontoxic, dries quickly, and gives a nice bright-but-not-shiny color palette.

Real Milk Paint is good but Old Fashioned Milk Paint is the best.

Thanks for watching and reading. See you tomorrow for the next game.

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"The term 'whittling' conjures images of old men making shavings while sitting on a bench in front of the general store. My definition of whittling [...] is simply any carving done with a knife. Carving implies the use of chisels, gouges, and a mallet, while sculpting is just carving while wearing a beret with a plump nude sprawled out in front of you." - Keith Randich, Old Time Whittling

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"Many games now thought to be mere children's pastimes are, in fact, relics of religious rituals." - Frederic V. Grunfeld, Games of the World (1975)

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I began the day on the beach.

I came home with many, many stones in my pockets.

Today, we'll be making the game of Oware, or Wari, which you may know as Mancala.

I remember Mancala as an exceptionally boring game when I was a kid. I don't know about you, but at my elementary school, we played with the rule that you got to keep taking turns as long as you didn't end your turn on an empty spot. It was boring as hell, waiting for your turn, watching your opponent rack up the points.

But that's not Oware! The older set of rules that define Oware are much more fun that the modern version we call Mancala. Tic-Tac-Toe, too, is wimpy and unfun compared to his great-great-grandaddy, Three Man's Morris. This isn't always true, but there are many such cases. My understanding of Oware is that it is similar to Chess, in that it was historically a test of leadership, strategy, and wit. I find this kind of thing very interesting. I don't think many people nowadays would want to choose their leaders based on their skill at Chess (or, god forbid, Monopoly). But it wasn't that long ago that Chess was seen as a real measure of martial ability. In fact, it could be argued that all of modern war simulations and wargames are just Chess DLC.

Maybe the closest thing we have to a game-based meritocracy in America is the game of Football. Lots of professional athletes go on to have high-profile careers in business and politics and culture.

I think of these as examples of a Ludocracy, from the latin ludum/ludo/ludus, which refers to the playing of games. I would argue that we do have a parial Football ludocracy at work in this country. The skill of being good at Football is congruent with being perceived as an effective leader. Our national spirit favors aggressive play, strong team identities, dramatic moments, and lots of scheming in between moments of action. Don't you think? It kind of fits, right?

Soccer, the game of the rest of the world, might inspire a ludocracy that favors more passing, sharing, fast-paced communication, and uninterrupted play. Soccer, too, encourages strong tribalism between teams, like Football does. Is this analysis of cultures really true? I'm not sure, but it's a compelling lens with which to examine groups of people.

What would a ludocracy based on Yahtzee look like? Would that be a culture that embraced more luck and randomness? What about a ludocracy of Scrabble? A society of word dorks and literature nerds?

Personally, I think I'd enjoy a ludocracy rooted in the game of Tag. One person has all the power, and everyone else runs around going nana-nana-boo-boo.

The influence of a ludocracy goes both ways. In a culture where leaders are chosen based on their prowess in Chess or Football, children are taught to excel in those games. We are teaching to the test, in a way.

Adults who pass on these game to children hope that the associated values are also instilled in the next generation: teamwork, strategic thinking, willpower, communication, etc.

So, in a competitive sport like Tennis, you're learning how to move quickly and predict your opponent, but you're also being tested on your innate abilities too. It becomes a talent vs practice question, or a nature vs nurture question. Does a ludocratic game bring out the innate talent of a chosen few, or does a ludocratic game instill a worldview into the general population?

I first started thinking through a ludocratic lens after reading Venkatesh Rao's post on traditional games from India. It's really quite an incredible short essay.

Rao describes the strengths of Indian games, including breathlessness, leaderlessness, and a dynamic tension between teamwork and individual heroism. He writes that these things are also reflected in the Indian national character and spirit. I find this kind of insight fascinating.

In various books on games and the history of play, I notice that there is a slippery slope of ethnic categorization and racism that many authors find all too compelling. African games are often categorized as "primitive," while games from Asia are described as "decadent." It's old-fashioned and reductive and a very poor way to understand cultural objects, in my opinion.

I consider games similar to food. Different game mechanics provide different social nutrition to groups. Games provide a variety of interesting moments, just like food provides a variety of interesting flavors. Games allow us to be close to each other, to cheer each other onwards, to wrestle each other to the ground, to see each other in new contexts, to experience theophanic victory and crushing defeat.

In the same way, the different foods of any particular place or time provide a different mix of nutrients. Some people have to dehydrate seawater for their salt, while others have an abundance in nearby mineral deposits. Some people have to work very hard for all available protein, while others can spend a day netting fish and enjoy meat for a whole season.

So, instead of classifying cultures based on the games they play, a slightly different angle that I prefer is to consider the moments that those games facilitate. The individual "tasting notes," as Ben Orlin calls them in Math Games with Bad Drawings.

In a game of Oware, you are only allowed to pick up stones from your own side of the board. The game ends when a player has no more stones on their side of the board, and therefore cannot play another turn. Here is a tasting note, then: on every turn, you must ensure your own abundance, and keep famine away.

However, as you play, almost always you will find yourself sowing stones onto your opponent's side of the board. Another tasting note: you cannot win without sometimes helping your opponent to prosper as well.

So, when considering the games you play, consider the tasting notes of experience which are provided by the game. Consider what skills and talents are necessary to be victorious. In a game of Monopoly, for example, a ruthless patience for wealth accumulation is crucial to winning the game.

Next time you sit down to play a game - and I hope it is Oware that you are playing - ask yourself, what would a ludocracy of this game look like? What kind of world would that be?

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"People can't anticipate how much they'll miss the natural world until they are deprived of it." - Mary Roach, Packing for Mars

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"Though you like your ale with ceremony in the drinking-halls, I like better to snatch a drink of water in my palm from a spring. Though you think sweet, yonder in your church, the gentle talk of your students, sweeter I think the splendid talking the wolves make in Glenn mBolcáin. Though you like the fat and meat which are eaten in the drinking-halls, I like better to eat a head of clean water-cress in a place without sorrow." - unknown Irish author, 12th century

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Before we begin, I want to show you the final product of yesterday's project! After the milk paint dried overnight, I added a layer of walnut oil. Look at how lovely!

Today's game is known by many names: Fractal-Tac-Toe, Hyperdimensional Tic-Tac-Toe, Naughts and Naughts and Crosses and Crosses, and Giant's Toe, to name a few.

The best explanation for this game comes from Ben Orlin's book Math Games with Bad Drawings, which is a wonderful book of curious diversions. He calls this game Ultimate Tic-Tac-Toe.

Ben does such a good job explaining the game, I'm going to just show you his description here:

Trust me, this game is exceptionally fun. Everyone knows how to play (and win) Tic-Tac-Toe, and so teaching them this extra level of the game is very easy. But it is very hard to predict how the game will end until the very final moments! I've never played a boring game of Fractal-Tac-Toe.

As you can see here, I (J. Feeeeeeeee) was thoroughly whooped by my friend (G. Webster), even though I thought I was absolutely conquering until the final maneuver.

Obviously, you can play Giant's Toe with just a pen and paper, so I don't really "need" to make an artisinal, organic, handmade version. Similarly, I don't "need" to be drinking a grapefruit soda pop at 10:04 in the morning.

Let's begin. I'm going to cut a linoleum stamp to create a printable Naughts and Naughts and Crosses and Crosses board.

Something I really love about simple games like this is that they could have been invented at any time in history. As we learned yesterday, Tic-Tac-Toe variants have existed for thousands of years. Anyone, at any time, could have picked up a pencil, or a nub of charcoal, or a stick, and sketched a Fractal-Tac-Toe board on a piece of paper / scrap of parchment / roadside mud patch, respectively.

I feel that way about needle felting, too. Needle felting seems like such an old craft but it was only invented in the middle 20th century. Wet-felting, of course, is as old as wool itself. But nobody bothered to cut some notches in a needle until the hippie generation.

It gives me great hope to think that there are so many simple worlds still undiscovered. Simple recipes, simple crafts, simple songs, simple games that anyone can learn and enjoy, waiting just out of reach for thousands of years, ready to be discovered.

What's next? Martian Tic-Tac-Toe?

Hollowing out these little tic-tac squares is a fiddly challenge, but I am Hephaestus's strongest soldier.

Look at that lovely board! Finished already?? No!!

Everybody knows that the only real point of any game is: TO KNOW WHO WON.

I would really love to do some crazy Celtic knotwork around the border. I got this book on knotwork ages ago and I want to give it a try!

Something I find really interesting about Giant's Toe is that every turn takes away a choice.

I guess the same is true of Tic-Tac-Toe or any other space-filling game, but Fractal-Tac-Toe feels different.

Every time you lay down an X or an O, you send your opponent to another section of the gameboard. It's a miniature set of coordinates, and you are bouncing around the grid constantly.

And every time you get sent from one coordinate to another, that pathway is used up. Every turn, you lose a future choice, until victory or failure is inevitable.

Many other games ebb and flow in the freedom of play during a game. In chess, movement begins very constricted, and then play is much more free in the midgame, and then your choices become limited again in the endgame.

In Fractal-Tac-Toe, the game is continuously constricting. You and your opponent tighten around each other's futures, squeezing their chances, until the final triumphant victory.

Fractal-Tac-Toe is a very dramatically satisfying game. Try it out next time you have a pen and a napkin and a friend.

See you tomorrow for the next game!

⭐⭐⭐

"Personally, I say man's greatest game is 'the floor is lava,' but I get a kick out of encompassing the infinite now and then. I cordially invite you to join me." - Ben Orlin, Math Games with Bad Drawings

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"Games are an essential aspect of cultural activity, comparable in some ways to the performing arts." - David Parlett, The Oxford History of Board Games

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Today I'd like to try and make a willow bark box.

These kinds of boxes are most commonly made of birch bark, but I've recently seen one made out of linden bark, and I have a lot of beautifully big pieces of willow sitting around. The tops and bottoms of these boxes are discs of wood, so I think they could make a perfect little board game, and the pieces for the game could fit inside the box!

I harvested lots and lots of willow bark this spring, and coiled them up into these handy packages.

Look at that color and texture!!

I'll let that soak for a few minutes while I research the game we will be making today. As you can see, this pot has been used for some natural dyestuffs recently! Madder root, perhaps?

While I'm working on this project today, I'm rewatching Waking Life for the zillionth time. I love this movie. Always makes my day wyrd. The passionate monologues of all these odd characters makes me feel more receptive to inspiration.

I've decided: I'm going to make Three Man's Morris today.

Three Man's Morris is the grandaddy of Tic-Tac-Toe. The idea is that you start with an empty board, and players take turns placing one piece at a time, trying to make three in a row. Once all the pieces are on the board, players take turns moving the pieces along the board, trying to make that ever-elusive arrangement, the three-in-a-row.

Three Man's Morris is also called Nine-Holes, because of course there are nine spaces on the board. It was common in the Middle Ages to dig nine holes on the side of the road, and use three sticks as your game pieces.

There was a story I heard of a servant who took a bet from another servant - that he couldn't keep his lord from missing church on Sunday morning. The lord, apparently, was quite devout. The servant took the bet and met the lord the next morning on the way to church.

The servant sketched a Nine-Hole board on the ground, and the two quickly got to playing. Whenever the lord seemed to become impatient, the servant would engage him again, and the lord would be drawn back into another game.

Not only did the lord miss his holy service, but he didn't come home for lunch or dinner, and was roundly beaten by his wife for his foolishness!

There have been Three Man's Morris boards carved into ancient Egyptian roofing tiles, scratched into English cathedral steps, and dug into ancient Roman floors.

Buddha spoke out against games like this - though probably not this game in particular. Various spiritual leaders from many traditions have taken issue with these kinds of games.

I wonder why these games are seen as sinful, or at least distracting? Maybe it's that old classism at work again - the wealthy and powerful fighting to control every free moment of working people.

I was reading David Partlett's book this morning, The Oxford History of Board Games. He makes the assertion that games have historically been very adult activities. It is ahistorical, and very recent, to associate games with children.

So, at least in most of Europe, we see this strange tension between adult institutions and adults being interested in playing games. Perhaps it is an issue of earthly desires, like sex and food and avarice.

So, this bent-bark box thing. I'm trying to carve down the sides of this Three Man's Morris board into a smooth circle, so the bark can be bent evenly and snug to the surface. This is going to be the top of the box.

I finished watching Waking Life, and I've moved onto watching Johnny Mnemonic.

In Johnny Mnemonic, Keanu Reeves is a data-smuggler whose brain is overburdened with illegal information. His companion is befallen by the Black Shakes - information overload from the technological infrastructure of their world.

I think we've all got a minor, chronic form of the Black Shakes. Information overload. Doomfeeding. Handmade games are a remedy - that's my theory.

IRL games allow us to play freely without having to download massive global panic-info. No screens, no web interface, just a few rules and a few sticks or rocks.

Games aren't always subversive to power, but I think the best ones are. Games can provide an unmediated intimacy between two people, or a group of people, free of hegemonic surveillance.

Watching 1990s cyberpunk movies always make me talk all paranoid like that.

Anyways, look how nice this bark is! The willow bark went from crispy-dry to leather-soft just from soaking in water.

I'm going to use this birch bark technique for making a little arrowhead sort of thing. This is from Bernard S. Mason's book Woodcraft.

I haven't tried this before but it seems pretty straightforward!

To fasten the bark to the wooden top, you poke a little hole...

... then drill it out...

Then stick a little peg in there to hold it all in place!

Something wonderful about slöjd projects like this is that all the materials carry their own story.

This willow bark is from willow rods I cut in the summer. I sliced the bark from tip to tail, and then peeled it off the young sapling trees.

The naked saplings I brought up to North House Folk School to use as gigantic pick-up-sticks for their summer solstice festivities! And so, those same willows are providing the containing walls for this new game of Nine-Holes.

The wooden discs I'm using here are from a birch tree that a friend's friend was cutting from their front lawn. The tree was absolutely massive, and it was just the right time of year to harvest the bark as well.

And so, a friend's friend's birch gave the wood for this game!

The little pegs I'm using to keep this all together was another small piece of the lightning-struck ash I used yesterday. It was cut down from a friend, on the recommendation of another quite magickal friend.

And so! This box was made from local materials, all provided by friends or for friends. Isn't that wonderful!

Our last bit is just to make a few pegs to play with!

Oh!!! Delightful!

Some lovely paint, and we'll let them sit overnight.

Thanks for the read. See you tomorrow for the next one!

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"Play validates itself. Its purpose and value are intrinsic. True games serve no conscious practical purpose beyond that of satisfying an urge to play which is sometimes regarded as an instinct. 'He who must play cannot truly play' declares James Carse, in Finite and Infinite Games (a theology book, as some have found to their surprise)." - David Parlett, The Oxford History of Board Games

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"Interest in old board games may arise from finding some bygone relic in an antique shop, seeing a display on the shelves of a museum, from stumbling across obscure games in travellers' accounts, or in archaeological references to fragmentary gaming-equipment discovered on ancient sites." - R.C. Bell, Discovering Old Board Games

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This month, my birthday month, October, of the year of our current era 2025, I will be handcrafting one (1) game a day until All Hallow's Eve.

We are going to start with a very small game called Pong Hau K'i. This game is very compelling, because it feels like the simplest possible game of its kind that still feels like a game. It's the same sort of thing as Tag. You can't possibly make a simpler game. It's like a whole genre in itself.

I found this game in R.C. Bell's Discovering Old Board Games, a slim yet rich volume that is both historically responsible and ludically fascinating.

I have some beautiful pieces of lightning-struck ash (!!!) which I split into thin pieces a long time ago. It's amazingly hard, and feels immensely magical. When a tree is struck by lightning, the electrical charge zipping through the cells of the tree can flash-dry the whole thing in one moment. The structure of the tree stays the same but it is immediately and perfectly dried and hardened! Isn't that amazing?

I just want a little square piece of this to use for the board.

My splitting technique here is........ not recommended. Unsafe and foolish.

Beautiful! There's something about a nice little square of wood that inspires infinite possibilities. I also feel this way about trees. And sheep. The materials encourage endless dreaming.

I recently acquired this chisel, it's a very interesting little thing. The blade is ever so slightly concave, so I want to try and use it to smooth out the surface of the game board.

It works! Of course, I have a very cheap phone-grip-stand, so it wiggles quite fiercely when clamped to a table on which chiseling is going on.

Delightfully smooth!

My friend Maeve Gathje has made some wooden trivets with little wooden nub-feet carved out of the bottom. I'm going to try and do the same with this piece. The wood is very hard and I'm used to working with fresh green wood, so it's a bit of slow going!

The way to play this game is to move one piece at a time along the board lines. You keep going until you can't make a move. If you can't make a move, you lose! That's it. It's wicked simple but the trick of it takes a bit to learn.

It took a while but I quite love the little feet!

They add a nice little shadow and elevation to the board, too.

Now to drill the holes. I want the playing pieces to be little pegs, and the board to have holes for the pegs to fit in snug. It's not a very deep piece of wood so I've added a little piece of tape to the drill bit as a depth-gauge! A classic trick.

So lovely! This is a great game to sketch on a napkin, or draw in the beach sand, or lay out with sticks. I love games like that. It's impossible to know really how old they are, because there are no records of all the boards etched in the dirt.

If I make another board like this, I think I'd like to paint it first, then gouge the lines. I think the contrast between the color of the paint and the color of the wood might be very bright and crisp! But, for today, I'm going to gouge these lines as deep as I can and then give it a good oil.

Oh!!!! It is most beautiful! Why is it that a little carved line can give so much joy? Just a wee bit of whittling makes my heart leap.

Yow!!! I carved down the edges so now all the surfaces are quite nice, quite nice.

Oiled!!!! Look at 'er shine! Wood as a material is such a gift. It is such a joy to work with, and such a joy to experience with all the senses!

Now for the pieces: I've snipped four little birch twiglets here. They're still fresh and green, so they won't take oil until they are totally dried out, but we can still use them!

Ruth Goodman writes in her book The Domestic Revolution that human dependence on wood for daily needs has severely dropped off since the introduction of fossil fuels. It was not so long ago that British and American people needed all sizes of wood for burning, cooking, weaving into baskets, carving into tools, building, repairing, and so much more. As we have transitioned to an industrial world, we have forgotten the bounty of our forests, and the biodiversity of the wildwood has suffered.

It is my work to nurture a dependence on the forest. There is so much joy in the greenwood.

Ope - almost forgot to drill the last hole!

⭐⭐⭐

"Only if we care, will we help. Only if we help, shall all be saved." - Jane Goodall, The Book of Hope

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If you're living in the northern wilds and interested in ancient gaming, there are still spots available in my Old World Games class!

"Wooden playthings were the ordinary creations of an individual or a local craftsman before the advent of industrialization" - Swedish Wooden Toys

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Today's post resides in another leaflet, where I have kept a journal over the last few days. The tl;dr is that I carved, painted, and finished a clever little wooden puzzle that looks like this:

It's a small project I found in a book, but the entirety of the description is just this:

As you can guess, it took some trying and failing to get it right.

I took notes along the way with a leaflet page, which I've embedded below. You can also follow this link to the same page.

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"As you train your eyes to see and your hands to know, you will strengthen your belief in yourself. Don't be afraid to ask questions and go beyond the rules. Experiment in safety, and learn by doing." - Ann Sayre Wiseman, The Best of Making Things

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I'm teaching a class on Old World Games like Hnefatafl and Nine Man's Morris on the north shore of Lake Superior in late November. Sign up here if you're interested! I'm also teaching a kid's course on Nine Man's Morris, and a kid's course on making sewing kits.

"Plants seem like the right place to land my weary, apocalyptic attention." - Zoë Schlanger, The Light Eaters

⭐⭐⭐

For the past two days, I've been in class at North House Folk School, learning birch bark basketry with Beth Homa-Kraus. She is known to many as Birch Bark Beth.

Birch bark can be harvested without injuring the tree, if you harvest with care. The layers of bark can be peeled apart until you have a stack of paper-thin sheets, or the bark can be kept thick and strong to use for sturdier projects. As you can see, the bark makes a wonderful sheath. All four of these sheaths are displaying the stunning golden inner layer of birch bark, which is the most recent layer of growth. Inside every birch is a golden ring! Bet you didn't know that.

Glasses can also be constructed from birch bark, here modeled by the author (yours truly). Birch bark doesn't stretch, doesn't compress, and creases firmly in the same way a thick piece of paper does. It is water-resistant and rot-resistant. A well-made birch bark basket will outlive us all.

I borrowed Beth's book on flax-craft during these past few days. Flax leaves, so I learned, can be used in a very similar way to birch bark strips. Thus: the glasses.

Birch is a complicated tree. Birch groves expand rhizomatically, like willows and strawberries. Long tentacles of root will sprout up new birch trees as they crawl through the boreal soil. A whole birch forest might have grown from a single seed.

Wherever birches grow, they are essential to the local culture. Peoples all over northern Europe, Asia, and America have been using birch bark since the beginning of time. People use birch bark to make shoes, hats, milk buckets, fire containers, cooking pots, entire houses, canoes, sugar cones, roofing shingles, and even to do their homework.

This is the writing of a 7-year-old boy named Onfim, who lived in Novgorod, Russia, about 700 years ago. On scraps of birch bark, Onfim practiced his letters, drew pictures of his friends, and wrote "I AM A BEAST". Kids are always kids, no matter where you go.

It is important, when harvesting birch bark, to leave something behind as an offering. This is true of all harvesting and foraging, but especially birch. Many peoples have called it the mother tree, and like a mother, you wouldn't want to take her generosity for granted. If you don't leave something in return for what you're taking, the little people might take something of yours to balance the score.

It is a pure delight to cut birch bark into strips. It is thick, like cardstock, but creamy and soft, like a nice cheddar cheese or a soft wax. The golden inner layer is slightly rough to the touch, like the hand of an old carpenter. The outer layers are more papery and are very effective surfaces for writing love notes.

We used a mixture of walnut oil and beeswax to moisturize the bark before weaving. It's not too bad for the hands, either.

There is a surprising amount of math to birch bark basketry. Weaving "on the diagonal," as most of us did, you must first weave a square base. This might be a 4x4 square, or 8x8, or 11x11. Then, turning up the edges, you find what Beth calls the basket within.

If you want to find your own basket within, take a class with Beth. She is one of the greatest teachers I've ever known, and that's a fact.

⭐⭐⭐

"My pagan head shall sink into the winterland, and there be purified." - J.A. Baker, The Peregrine

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I'm teaching a class on Old World Games like Hnefatafl and Nine Man's Morris on the north shore of Lake Superior in late November. Sign up here if you're interested! I'm also teaching a kid's course on Nine Man's Morris, and a kid's course on making sewing kits.

"Contemporary life demands smooth spaces that we can glide across without stopping. When winning gets dull enough, you start to wonder what other goals are available." - Kneeling Bus, Brave Men Run (In My Family)

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Theseotomy (noun) The operation in which a repairable object has been made into a single-use product.

The Ship of Theseus is an infamously repairable object. It is completely replaced, over the years, from stem to stern. The Ship of Theseus is theseous. It is capable of being repaired indefinitely.

A sock that can be darned is also theseous. Wool socks are wonderfully theseous. The repairs made to a woolen sock will felt back into the original fabric until they are inseparable. A sock made of acrylic yarns that frays and dissolves irreparably is non-theseous. That sort of industrially-made low-quality sock has undergone a theseotomy. A theseotomy is a procudure in which the theseous nature of a thing has been destroyed or damaged.

Wooden furniture made from strong oak, ash, or maple can be repaired, refinished, and reupholstered. A broken chair leg can be replaced or glued back together. Good furniture is theseous. IKEA and other cheap furniture companies make their products out of MDF, which crumbles apart. It cannot be repaired. Bad, cheap, industrialized furniture dissolves away. IKEA furniture has been theseotomied.

A handmade basket will, like all things, break and wear down over time. With the right materials, and a bit of skill, a basket can be repaired and parts can be replaced. A good basket is theseous. Milk crates are also a sort of basket. Plastic laundry baskets are baskets too. But these plastic baskets are very hard to repair, even if you have a plastic-welding tool and the right materials. It's not really worth it, either. Plastic baskets have undergone a theseotomy and are now non-theseous.

⭐⭐⭐

"The object isn't to make art, it's to be in that wonderful state which makes art inevitable." - Robert Henri

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There are still spots available in my Old World Games class at North House Folk School if you are in the mood to spend a few days making ancient board games out of wood, leather,a

⭐⭐⭐

"... as though evolution were suggesting, "if there's not enough of what you want, then want something else." This specialization to avoid scarcity has led to a dazzling array of biodiversity, each species avoiding competition by being different." - Robin Wall Kimmerer, The Serviceberry (2024)

Folkification (noun) A process in which a product, narrative, recipe, machine, or other object is made more accessible and less centralized.

Claire Saffitz folkifies candy, snack, and junk food recipes on her 2017-2020 show Gourmet Makes. Through sheer perseverance and creative genius, Claire decodes the arcane manufacture of industrially-produced foods and creates her own versions using accessible ingredients. The final moments of every video include a full recipe with ingredient measurements and individual steps. This is a folkification of centralized, opaque food manufacturing processes.

John Deere tractor software can be extremely restrictive. Farmers can find themselves locked out of essential systems, unable to repair their own machines. People have been jailbreaking these systems for many years, refolkifying the technology of a tractor. Everyone has a Right to Repair their own machinery.

Fan fiction is a folkification of narrative intellectual property of massive media companies. Stories belong to everyone: this is a truth asserted by fan fiction authors. Walt Disney took folktales and commercialized them. Now, we can do the same, by taking corporate-copyrighted narratives and folkifying them. (My favorite example of this is the Star Wars retelling inside the post-draconic-apocalypse world of Reign of Fire.)

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"Writing is not what follows research, learning, or studying, it is the medium of all this work." - Sönke Ahrens, How to Take Smart Notes

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Some classes of mine have spots still available! Handmade Games, ages 8-12 (St. Peter) and Old World Games for all ages (Grand Marais).

⭐⭐⭐

"There's a lot of spiritual energy available when you slip out of a civilized event." - Martin Shaw, Bardskull

I've had this idea for a while, to make a crayon inside a horsetail stalk. Horsetails are some of the oldest extant species on the planet and they are very weird.

Each of the stalks can be cut apart, or even pulled apart, and in doing so you may find that they are totally hollow inside. Thus: the perfect housing for a crayon.

But first, one must make a rack for to hold ye horsetails.

A nice piece of basswood presented itself for the occasion and was forthwithly en-holed.

First experiment: beeswax and turmeric. Goal: a yellow crayon.

Curry Crayon™️

double / double / toil and trouble

Pour! Pour before it hardens again!

Okay, so, a funnel doesn't work. The hole is too small and the wax hardens very quickly.

Another tip: get rid of all blobs and globs! If you don't, such flotsam will clog your precious tubes.

And yet! Despite all odds! Success!

It writes! But only just. It is gritty, and soft.

Next experiment: charcoal crayon!

After a quick crush-up with the pestle, I added a smidge of charcoal to the next batch of beeswax.

fire burn / and cauldron bubble

A much cleaner pour! The finely-ground charcoal and nicely-melted beeswax make a fine combination. I did notice that many of the horsetails actually leaked out the bottom, but just like the funnel, the hole plugged quickly with hardening wax.

It works! Once again, it is more gritty than I would expect. However, it doodles middling well.

"It is amazing that trees can turn gravel and bitter salts into these soft-lipped lobes, as if I were to bite down on a granite slab and start to swell, bud, and flower. Trees seem to do their feats so effortlessly." - Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

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I'm teaching some upcoming classes at a variety of venues in Minnesota: Basketry (Mankato), Woodcarving (Mankato), Toys and Games (St. Peter), Handmade Games (Grand Marais), and Old World Games (Grand Marais). See you there?

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"Will I run or will I face the moment? It is at once an almost overwhelming fear and the ever present question that will define the road ahead. Some cannot face the moment. Most live through it dragged along by the events and circumstances and the actions of others. A few grab it by the horns." - Joseph Marshall III, The Journey of Crazy Horse

I've been reading Eric Wargo's Time Loops. His vision of a retrocausal time stream is fascinating. The book proposes - very convincingly - that the future can affect the past, through the mind's ability to be aware of some aspects of its own future.

Maybe precognition and ESP make more sense if you consider that the mind is pre-remembering some information? If you have a bad feeling about a flight, it may be your pre-memory of reading a news article about that flight crashing. If you feel like you need to call your grandma, it might be a pre-memory of learning that she has just been swept to the hospital.

Wargo gets very granular, and suggests that down to the atomic level, elemental interactions might make more sense if they are understood to have a basic ability to pre-remember their own immediate future.

If this is all true, what might it mean for education? When a person has an innate "talent" for some kind of skill, is it perhaps a pre-memory of all the times they will use that skill later in life? When someone picks up a guitar and are immediately comfortable, does that indicate they are drawing on many many years of practice in their future?

Can you test pre-memory in a pedagogical setting? How would you? Are all skills drawing on both past and future practice?

Wargo's idea is that the mind is tuned to seek rewards and avoid displeasures, and so a hint of precognition about the future would be extremely beneficial in an evolutionary paradigm. If one could dimly feel their way towards a future which is joyful and victorious, rather than uncomfortable or disastrous, that would be a very desirable advantage indeed.

This makes me consider the role of presentation, show-and-tell, or performance in an educational setting.

A hypothetical situation: I have a circle of students learning to carve wood. Perhaps we're making small characters.

The students could go home with their carvings at the end of class, without showing or telling about them. Alternatively, we could have a show-and-tell or even a small performance with the pieces at the end of class.

If Wargo is correct, I think a show-and-tell would orient people towards creating a figure that they are proud of, and will receive joy from presenting, even if they don't know they are presenting their piece until the end of class! The future-feeling of joy and accomplishment would subconsciously orient students towards creating an object which they would be proud to present.

Is this true? I dunno. But, intuitively, it does feel like an accurate way to think about learning and experience. I would like to try out some experiments and see where they lead.

The axiom of temporality is only a taboo, and it can be transgressed.

"The past and the future are prostitutes nature has provided. Art is periodic escapes from this brothel." - Our Vortex (1914)

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I'm teaching some upcoming classes at a variety of venues in Minnesota: Basketry (Mankato), Woodcarving (Mankato), Toys and Games (St. Peter), Handmade Games (Grand Marais), and Old World Games (Grand Marais). See you there?

⭐⭐⭐

"All play means something." - Johan Huizinga, Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play Element in Culture

In the fall, I will begin the two-year Artisan Development Program at North House Folk School. Two weeks ago, I wrote about some guiding ideas I'd like to pursue during this residency. My focus is going to be on the traditional craft of making toys, games, puzzles, and other amusements

Today, I'm thinking about haunted toys.

Why are dolls so freaky? What is the Lament Configuration? Is Barbie living in a pocket dimension? Is POLYBIUS real? How does Jumanji trap the souls of children? These are the thoughts that bounce around my shiny bald head as I whittle little puppets and board game pieces.

This angle of magick and occultism is very interesting to me. You can find more of my work on esoteric things at Gnostic Technology, where I've written a bit about the magickal aspects of play.

There are so, so, so many movies that feature haunted dolls. Why? The Twilight Zone was doing it in 1963, we're still doing it today with movies like M3GAN, and the creepy story of Robert the Doll began as far back as 1904. I'm really curious why this trope keeps reappearing. Why is this archetype so present?

I was told during my year at Lakota Youth Development that Lakota dolls don't have faces because realistic dolls allow spirits to become trapped inside the figure. Is this the same concern that is expressed in so many hundreds of horror movies on haunted dolls? If you wanted to approach it from a hard materialist angle (not my favorite, but let's try it) you could say that a more realistic-looking, human-looking toy draws your attention and tricks the mind into ascribing more human attributes to the doll.

But, we are wizards here and we know spirits are real, so we can explore more interesting possibilities. This area of research is new to me, and I don't have answers, just hunches and investigatory temptations.

There is an archeological site in the Czech Republic called Dolní Věstonice, which my friend Karin Valis tells me is probably pronounced "Dole-nee Vee-esto-nee-tza". This site is fascinating because a large collection of animal and human clay figurines have been found - but every single one was overcooked in the fire until it exploded. How strange!

I think there are two magickal techniques at work here. The first is that these "toy" figurines capture or reflect the spirit of the thing they represent. A lion figurine has an aspect of the real lion, an aurochs figurine has an aspect of a true aurochs. This seems to fit in well with our modern fear and belief in the soul-trapping abilities of dolls!

The second practice at work here, I think, is a kind of divination. Instead of cutting open the animal to read its intestines, this might be an easier way. Since the spirit of the creature is within the figurine, maybe the clay fragments could have been "read" in the same way an oracle might read the open organs of the animal? To me, this feels like the same kind of magickal force exerted when a creepy doll makes the lights flicker or whispers secrets. The figure is alive in a way that matters.

Okay, so that's the first of two paths I am curious about: do toys have a spirit of their own? Do toys trap living spirits? Could a toy be alive in its own sense? What can a toy really do?

I think there is a complimentary or opposite sort of magick at work in board games and video games. Games like Jumanji, TRON, and the Lament Configuration have a kind of magick. Games bring the spirit of the player into the game world. As opposed to toys, which seem to bring active spirits into our physical reality. Doesn't that seem like a kind of opposite magick? Spirit into matter, versus matter into spirit?

This power of games is something recognized by even the most scientific and non-esoteric perspectives. Game theorists (beginning with Johan Huizinga) use the term "magic circle" to describe the imaginary world that players participate in when playing a game. The enchantment of the magic circle transforms colored pieces of paper into Money, and pixels on the screen into Alduin the World Eater, and little red pins into Torpedoes.

This term of the magic circle is mostly used in a not-actually-magickal sense. However, in both popular media and in ancient magickal practice, it seems to me that the idea of the magic circle is quite real. Consider the Lament Configuration, the cursed Rubiks Cube from the Hellraiser movies.

Playing with the Lament Configuration summons a dimension of torture, pain, and hellish pleasure into being. It brings the "players" of the game into a non-consensus-reality magic world, which has real consequences. It doesn't always have to be creepy and weird. I think the box from Dragon Tales is basically the same mystic-tech as the Lament Configuration.

Same with TRON. Same with Jumanji and Zathura. From a magickal perspective, these are ceremonial objects that are the furniture of an alternative reality. Playing with them brings you there.

So, that's the second path I'm curious about: how much power does a game have? Can reality be shifted by an engaging game? What is the spiritual responsibility of a game designer, if games really are magickal tools? Are all games ceremonies, are all ceremonies games?

Much to think about. No conclusions yet.

"Play is serious or is not. But is it really serious? Is it as serious as, for instance, war? Is it even more serious than war[?]" - Marc De Kesel, Playthings of the Gods

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⭐ I'm teaching some upcoming classes: Basketry and Woodcarving at the Mankato Makerspace. Toys and Games at the Arts Center of Saint Peter. Toys and Games and Old World Games at North House Folk School! ⭐

"Complex missile weapons interpose a launcher between the human and the missile. Such weapon systems include the bow as well as the sling, the blowgun, the spearthrower, and the firearm. In the hands of a skillful and muscular archer, the (pre)historical bow was a powerful and accurate weapon. The firearm replaced the bow because it was easier to use, not because it was technically superior." - When Lethal Weapons Grew on Trees, Low-Tech Magazine

Today we will be reviewing the large outdoor games I brought to North House Folk School this past weekend for their annual Solstice Festival. I was invited to attain the position of Game Warden last year, and it was such a hit they invited me back.

We will be judging these games based on three criteria:

Capacity for Obsession: Some games and activities can be played for hours and hours, scratching just the right addictive itch. Others are fun for a moment but don't facilitate sustained enjoyment. This will be ranked from 1 to 5 locks: 🔒🔒🔒🔒🔒

Relationship-Building Opportunities: My favorite thing to see this weekend was parents teaching children, grandparents teaching grandkids, and friends teaching friends. This will be ranked from 1 to 5 swirling doublehearts: 💞💞💞💞💞

Craftsmanship: I'm more proud of some of these activities than others. This will be ranked from 1 to 5 axes: 🪓🪓🪓🪓🪓

Capacity for Obsession [🔒🔒🔒]

Jenga is a wonderful game and everyone above 3 years old knows how to play - and, importantly, knows how to set it back up again for the next people. The game demands intense focus, and I did indeed see a good amount of Locking In during play. However, I didn't see anyone play more than one round of Jenga. I just think it's not exactly a game you'd play all day.

Relationship-Building Opportunities [💞💞💞]

This is, of course, a group game. Unfortunately, it is very competitive, and so even though players are sitting together and paying lots of attention to each other, there is a bloodthirsty attitude to the whole affair that poisons any sense of camraderie.

Craftsmanship [🪓🪓🪓🪓]

I made this Jenga set a very long time ago, and the pieces have lasted admirably long. The paint is still bright and they've taken minimal damage for being banged around so bad these years. Unfortunately, the sizes are not exactly correct, and so the slightly larger blocks can get stuck in place and require some aggressive flicking. A set with a little more consistency and a little more smoothness would be very nice.

Capacity for Obsession [🔒🔒🔒🔒🔒]

One young girl in particular absolutely locked into the ring toss game this weekend. She was persistent; adamant; relentless. Her binocular vision sharpened, her predator's eyes watched every ring fall onto every hooked branch. She was an inspiration.

Relationship-Building Opportunities [💞💞]

There were some nice moments of parents helping their kids throw rings, but mostly the kids were left on their own for this one. The ring toss is for the solo adventurer, the wanderer through the valley of death, the soul-searching toddler.

Craftsmanship [🪓]

Three branches, one block, and many easily-broken small rings. Not my finest work but a very encouraging first prototype. I would definitely like to make the rings heavier, maybe by wrapping them in bright fabric. Some more interesting hooks and branches would also be fun!

Capacity for Obsession [🔒🔒🔒🔒]

I'm not sure what the secret sauce is, but ladderball just didn't have exactly what the ring toss was oozing. And yet, I did see a good amount of kids walking back and forth and back and forth between the two ladders, collecting their sticks for another throw. Perhaps if they had more throwable sticks they would obsess more completely.

Relationship-Building Opportunities [💞💞💞]

Many sweet moments of parents getting thwacked by an errant toss.

Craftsmanship [🪓🪓]

Well, I made this game too thin. When I was working on this ladderball set, it all felt very sturdy, but the moment I set it up I could see that I had nothing but a flimsy set of twigs. Indeed, one ladder completely broke in half on the first day. On the bright side, the game makes more sense and is more fun with just one ladder anyway. Note to self: if kids are going to use something, it needs to be twice as sturdy as you think it needs to be.

Capacity for Obsession [🔒]

Ah, my lovely, my dearest game! I love fidchell so very very much. I have the rules written up on my website (along with a printable board), and my friend Maeve Gathje and I teach fidchell-board-making as part of our Old World Games class. However, in the context of an outdoor yard game, it does not fit in so much with the others. It's a game that takes a bit of explaining - though it is no more complex than checkers - and a bit of practice to learn it correctly. Of course, those that take the time are duly rewarded with the most engaging gaming experience this side of the Pleistocene.

Relationship-Building Opportunities [💞💞💞]

I'm not sure how to rate this one. I witnessed a spectrum of relationship moments over the fidchell board. I saw a grandfather and very young grandson play a beautiful and engaging hour-long game together - but I also saw a marriage dissolve right on the board.

Craftsmanship [🪓🪓]

This drop cloth was a hardware store purchase, and I am ashamed to say the paint is just some simple acrylic glunge. However, I am quite proud of the evenness and symmetry of the lines. The game pieces were lake stones and small cuts of willow. There is so much that could go into a more beautiful fidchell board, but this one is real simple!

Capacity for Obsession [🔒🔒]

The classic! I think with the right pair of folks this can be an obsessive winner. Most of what I saw was a one-sided affair, where one player was fully engaged and the other player was getting demolished. Still, a quick round of checkers gets the mind humming.

Relationship-Building Opportunities [💞💞💞💞]

I saw so many parents teaching kids how to play checkers this weekend, and it warmed my heart. Us adults love passing on knowledge of the things we love! Even kids too young to understand the "real" game made their own fun and knocked the rocks around together.

Craftsmanship [🪓]

Anyone coulda painted squares on a sheet and found some rocks, and y'know what, that works just fine.

Capacity for Obsession [🔒🔒🔒🔒🔒]

This archery kit was a real experiment and real win! The target has two big birch bark circles, and it spins when hit. I only gave out a few arrows at a time, so kids would have to collect their arrows after shooting them. Very very very many kids clearly could have shot arrows for hours and hours, and could hardly be torn away by their accompanying adult.

Relationship-Building Opportunities [💞💞💞💞💞]

A wonderful moment that I saw again and again this weekend: a dad would squat down, wrap his arms around his child, and show them how to shoot their bow. It was really beautiful and I was proud to have facilitated those moments.

Craftsmanship [🪓🪓🪓🪓]

I was really pleased with how this turned out! I was expecting for a bow to get snapped, but it survived in one piece. I did have to replace the arrow fletchings quite often, but I figured out a new way to tie the birch bark into the shaft and now I'm quite confident I've got this one down. I may try and make a few sets to sell!

Capacity for Obsession [🔒🔒🔒🔒🔒]

I didn't get many good pictures of the pick-up sticks set, but I don't have to. You know it. It's the perfect game.

Relationship-Building Opportunities [💞💞💞💞💞]

People of all nations can unite under the banner of picking up sticks.

Craftsmanship [🪓🪓🪓🪓🪓]

No notes.

"A whole chapter of this study of games is devoted to examining the means by which games become part of daily life. Indeed, these manifestations contribute to the development in various cultures of their most characteristic customs and institutions." - Roger Caillois, Man, Play, and Games (1958)

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⭐ I am teaching lots of classes this summer, and there is room to sign up! Basketry and Woodcarving at the Mankato Makerspace, Toys and Games at the Arts Center of Saint Peter, and Toys and Games at North House Folk School! ⭐

"Divination, and its spin-off, game-playing, came into this area of direct access which was held to be usurping the privilege of priesthoods, and many religious systems have concerned themselves with its suppression. The bypassing of authority by ordinary people has always been considered a threat by those in command, who have always attempted to stop it. [...] These prohibitions were usually extended further to include dice and board games, a tacit recognition that such games were more than mere diversions, having supernatural connotations." - Nigel Pennick, Secret Games of the Gods (1989)

I am very honored to tell you that I will be moving to Grand Marais this fall to participate in Cohort IX of the Artisan Development Program at North House Folk School!

The program is an intensive year of professional development, craft skill practice, mentorship, entrepreneurial skill-building, teaching, learning, and traveling. Every ADP chooses their area of study to pursue. Some good friends of mine have been part of the ADP program, and they have pursued craft traditions including weaving, basketry, boat-building, felting, furniture craft, and bowl turning.

My personal focus is toys, games, and puzzles. That's right: I will be the First Toymaker To The King!

There are lots of adjacent ideas to toymaking that I want to explore. In no particular order, I want to list some of my interests here. These are idea-seeds that I will be germinating during my time as ADP! If any of these strike you, or inspire you, or you know an interesting tidbit... tell me!

Friedrich Froebel is the inventor of Kindergarten. His ideas were radical, inspired, cohesive, and holistic. Lately, I have been reading the wonderful Inventing Kindergarten by Norman Brosterman about Froebel. Brosterman is defending a very challenging and fascinating assertion: Kindergarten created the cognitive foundation for the modern world!

This book is making the case that Kindergarten activities were the foundation for Modernist thought and inquiry. Many pages of the book have juxtapositions that depict a Kindergarten activity facing a Modernist painting, building, or other creative project. They match up so well!

Kindergartens were started all over Europe and America in the early 1800s, and they all used Froebel's particular set of toys - called Froebel's Gifts - to teach fundamental and universal lessons. These early Kindergarteners included Freud, Jung, Einstein, Mondrian, Proust, Bohr, Planck... well, you should just read Brosterman's summary:

Isn't that something?

So, this is one idea-seed to germinate: new toys bring new ways of thinking.

Santa Claus is Comin' to Town is the best movie of all time. It's for kids, it's from 1970, it's all made of freaking stop-motion puppets, and it is all about the liberatory power of toys. An insurgent revolution, led by children wielding toys, against the iron demiurgical fist of the Burgermeister Meisterburger who dominates Sombertown.

So, another idea-seed: toys can be radical, liberatory, revolutionary, a tool of insurrection against the dreary drudge of life in the imperial core.

Gyan Chaupar is a board game from ancient India. This is the original game that inspired both The Game of Life and Snakes and Ladders!

The snakes in this game represent sins: lust, deceit, wrath, that sort of thing. The ladders represent virtues: honesty, diligence, compassion, and so on. The people who made and played these games saw clearly what some people have forgotten nowadays, which is that games can encode very big and serious ideas.

Elizabeth Magie was a progressive socialist feminist, born in 1866, and the inventor of the game which came to be known as Monopoly.

What many folks don't know is that the original version of Monopoly was an educational game. The point of the game - which will come as no surprise - is that monopolies are miserable and unfun. Playing Monopoly is a hopeless grind towards poverty. Lizzie Magie knew this. That was the point of the game.

The game we know as Monopoly is only the first part of Magie's two-part game. The second half of the game was a monopoly-busting cooperative venture! The entire point of Magie's game was to be a teaching tool for young unionizers, socialists, and poor working folk. Life is better when we work together!

Amabel Holland made a fantastic video that goes into more detail on Magie and the idea of radical game mechanisms. It's brilliant. Watch it.

So, another idea-seed: toys and games can be fundamental and foundational to the cosmology of a culture. At the very least, toys and games can be teaching tools which describe a better world.

Hnefatafl (pronounced "neffa-taffle" and translated as "King's Table") is one of my favorite games. My friend Maeve Gathje and I occasionally teach a class on making your own Hnefatafl set! From the archeological evidence, it seems the game was immensely popular everywhere from Ireland to Finland to Germany for several hundred years.

Because it was so widespread, there are an immensity of board sizes, rulesets, and piece configurations. The following images are from the excellent and concise An Introduction to Hnefatafl by Damian Gareth Walker.

Pieces have been found from a huge variety of materials, too. Bone, ivory, wood, stone, even glass!

Hnefatafl game boards have been found etched in the floor, made of leather, made of wood, and even scratched in the boards of a Viking-era ship.

So, an idea-seed: games change and grow and evolve. Games adapt to the local environment, just like any creature or any craft.

Right now, most of my research is taking place on are.na. Follow along if you dare.

I'm not sure where this upcoming year will take me, but I know these seeds will grow, and I know I am eager to taste their fruit.

"It's a difficult responsibility / when you accept an appointment from His Majesty / you must strive for just the perfect quality / when you're the First Toymaker To The King!" - Santa Claus is Comin' to Town (1970)

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"Freedom is not earned or won, it is built." - Evelyn Bi, On Object Freedom

In January of 2020, I began a one-year internship at North House Folk School with three other young folks interested in traditional crafts.

The campus of North House is always alive with people. Axes thump into stumps as students carve curls of wood off spoon-shaped branches. Looms bang and crash as yarn is thrown from arm to arm. Hammers ring on anvils. People gather in the warmth of the stone oven and bake bread.

In two months, the pandemic had begun, and all was suddenly silent. I wave to the beavers on the dock, and that is my social interaction for the day. A stranger walks their dog on the other side of the street, and they are the only human person I've seen all morning. All of a sudden, the campus of North House is my entire world.

This was my introduction to the idea of a silver institution. An organization that people fall back on when power structures start to crumble.

The Roman Empire was a gold institution for much of Europe. They used military occupation, financial manipulation, religious enforcement, and all other forms of hegemonic dominion both violent and subtle to run the place.

Gold institution: the first-place champions in the battle of hierarchy. Gold medalists. The top of the pyramid. The crown-bearing corporation or tribe or NGO or council or family or militia that runs the show. The pyramidion.

What happens when a gold institution falls? When the western half of Rome fell, the Church was there. The Church had hierarchy, rules, the trust of the community, infrastructure, land, knowledge. The Church was a silver institution, waiting in second place, ready to wax into fullness.

Behind the Confederacy, the KKK was there, a silver institution reflecting the bitter light of secession. After the war, the power fell into their hands, and a generation of cruelty unfolded.

When natural disaster befalls a community, silver institutions shine brightly. Hospitals and schools and scout troops come together and rescue people from rooftops or search for people buried in rubble.

Living in the Kali Yuga, gold institutions certainly seem to be falling to pieces. This seems to be true no matter where your vote swings: things are going to hell.

And when they do go to hell, and the arches are burning, and all the escape boats have been shot down, what silver institution will take the place of the hegemony? Will your community fall into the hands of a white supremacist militia, or a hippie commune, or a police state, or a community garden, or a theocratic cult, or a farm co-op?

Working at a school, I think that our building and our community is a strong contender for a silver institution. Students and families know how to get to the school. We have a kitchen. Community spaces for big meetings. Bathrooms. Tornado shelters. A garden and a greenhouse and an orchard. Technology and tools and trust.

What silver institutions are you part of? If all bets were off, with whom would you join your fate? I doubt that many people would go to their 9 to 5 in the event of an apocalypse. But, perhaps, you might go to the library, or community center, and seek shelter?

If food becomes scarce, do you have a community garden or orchard to rely on?

If clothing becomes unaffordable, do you know a weaver? A fiber guild? Someone with needles and thread?

These aren't questions meant to frighten. Look at the state of things. Everything is damned expensive and the future is uncertain at best, calamitous at worst. It is time to build up silver institutions that you believe in, because they may become gold sooner than you think.

We need new hearths to gather around.

To me, cultivating silver institutions is a much more resilient and practical strategy than hoarding beans and ammunition. I would argue that a clean, healthy river is a silver institution: if I can fish and eat my catch without contracting mercury poisoning, then I am less reliant on the current gold institution for groceries. When it collapses, I will not be so distraught, because I have a relationship to the silver institution of an ecologically rich waterway.

Every Sunday, I invite my friends over to my living-room-turned-workshop to make things. We craft for hours. We call it Folkroom. It is an anti-apocalyptic ceremony, our very own home-grown silver institution.

I urge you: find the silver.

"Develop a deep connection with place and material. Be as low-impact as possible. Use local materials as much as possible. If using new materials, make sure they are as responsibly-sourced as possible. Be experimental. Always consider potential use of objects, materials, and substance, especially before discarding anything. Work with natural processes: embrace cycles of change. Recording activity and experience is as much an outcome as "made" objects." - Alice Fox's artist manifesto, from her book Wild Textiles

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"A profound facet of gardening has been the way it fuses the act of caring for something else with the act of caring for myself." - Willa Köerner, interviewed by Rachelle Robinette

Grab a scissors, or a pruners, or a strong knife, and walk outside.

Walk until you find a tree with a twig to spare.

Cut it. Does it yield easily, like willow? Is it soft, like pine? Or stringy, like elm? Or just damned hard, like oak or ash or buckthorn?

Strip the bark. Feel the sap sweat out from the wood. The life-water of the tree, the wood-blood, is on your hands. It smells like cucumbers. Fresh rain. Green.

If the twig is from a willow, keep the bark. It is an ancient and global medicine. Willow bark is a painkiller, anti-inflammatory. It has been prepared in countless ways since the beginning of time. The current most popular willow bark recipe is known as Aspirin. But you can make it yourself.

If the twig is from a linden, also known as basswood, eat the leaves. They are delicious. A nutty flavor. Crisp.

If the twig is from a sumac, fast-growing, tall-reaching, you might poke out the pith and use it for a straw.

Leave the twig to dry. Somewhere you can see it everyday. Do you notice how it becomes hard, less flexible?

You wonder: could I have bent it into a more interesting shape when it was fresh and green? Yes, you could have. And there are many more twigs out there. Try it.

Place the dry twig in your kitchen, alongside your spatulas, your cooking spoons, your tongs.

Perhaps the twig will stir syrup into your coffee. Maybe it will scrape the last bits of egg from the pan.

If you had chosen a branched twig, and sharpened the tips, could you have used it as a fork?

If you had been more adventurous, chosen a stranger shape, could it still have been useful?

A quiverful of twigs will serve you well. Don't go anywhere without one.

"All Americans, regardless of caste, live in a culture woven of self-referential illusions... a simulated republic of eagles and big box stores, a good place to live so long as we never stray outside the hologram." - Joe Bageant, quoted by Gordon White in The Chaos Protocols

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"I get this shape in my head and sometimes I know what it comes from and sometimes I don't... and I think... there are a few shapes that I have repeated a number of times during my life and I haven't known I was repeating them until after I had done it." - Georgia O'Keeffe

I've been making a lot of hoods lately. The hood on the left, the brown one I'm wearing, was a Christmas gift from a good friend. They bought it from Grimfrost and it immediately became an essential part of my wardrobe. It is called the Hood of Skjoldehamn, as the design is a recreation of a hood worn by a 1,000-year-old body found in a marsh in Skjoldehamn, Norway.

That's me, playing GameCube, moments after receiving the hood. I didn't take it off for at least twelve hours. I wore the hood all night during an eight-hour layover at the most esoteric airport in the country. I've worn it in the snow and the rain. Up north and out west.

The hood itself is a very simple shape. Two rectangles and two squares are sewn together with simple seams and there you have it: the Hood of Skjoldehamn. You can sew a second hood, as a liner, and attach them together - but it isn't necessary.

I've written about the project process elsewhere, so I won't reiterate it all here. Suffice to say that this 1,000-year-old design from Viking-Age/Medieval Norway is just as effective and fashionable today as it was then.

If you'd like to make your own, which I encourage, read that leaflet. I hope it is a thorough guide for your path towards hooded glory.

The Hood of Skjoldehamn is a piece of clothing that everyone can make. With only basic sewing knowledge and a ruler, you can have one yourself in a weekend's time. I promise.

The hood has me thinking about our separation from the handmade world. It is something I am always trying to undo. In the effort towards understanding the story of craft, I'd like to propose a Topology of Enrobement.

The first dimension is from Shitty to Tough. Some clothes last a lifetime, and others deteriorate very quickly. The following examples are from my personal experience.

The long underwear, in particular, had that horrible loose overlock stitch so common in cheap-ass clothing (pictured below). The overlock stitch is fast and cheap, but truly a wretched way to hold fabric together.

The long underwear came apart the very first time I wore them and the entire thing fell into pieces like wet newspaper. Lots of clothes are like this, as I'm sure you are aware, but it can be hard to know what's what. Price doesn't always determine Shittiness or Toughness. Especially if clothes are packaged, or you're buying online, there's no way to be sure of the quality of the fabric or the stitching.

This brings us to the second dimension of the Topology of Enrobement.

The duality of Folk vs Robot is where I really get riled up. Folk garments are handmade, vernacular, local, transmissable, viral, open-source and made with care. Robotic garments are automated, industrialized, copyrighted, dropshipped, and profit-margined. For an incredible breakdown of this duality, watch Bernadette Banner's video on buying a fast-fashion knockoff of her handmade dress. She's brutal. It's great.

Anything from Temu, Shein, and increasingly Amazon is probably going to be something made for a fast profit out of shitty materials with all the corners cut. You know this already. It's the worst.

There's something about a meaningless, ugly baseball hat that lends the object an eternal solidity. There are hats I have worn for years, and abused without compassion, and yet every thread is still in place (though stained with a variety of industrial and organic wastes).

However, baseball hats are not very accessible as a handmade craft. They require some very weird stitching, and hard-to-find materials, and surprisingly complex geometric design. In a world without automation and immense global infrastructure, I actually don't think baseball hats would ever flourish.

In the historical record, hats are often much simpler. Circles, squares, and triangles win the day every time.

In the Folk/Shitty quadrant, we will find anything that is both accessible and stupid. I have a real fire burning against these kinds of things. Macaroni art, plastic beads, glue slime, pipe cleaners, popsicle sticks. Burn it all and cover the ashes with rocks so the dogs can't dig it up. Some people will make the case that high-quality materials are not accessible to everyone, or that not everyone has a high-enough level of skill to make really "nice" objects. This is a a trick and a lie.

If you have access to foam, glue, popsicle sticks, markers, and other arts and crafts supplies, then you definitely have access to used blankets, sheets, tablecloths, and other weird fabrics that wash up at your local thrift store.

While it's true, of course, that not everybody has the skill to sew a lined jacket or knit a pair of socks, history is full of everyday objects made by everyday people with minimal skill. Your own lack of skill has been weaponized against you to make you think you have to buy everything in your life.

I think teaching kids to craft only with hot glue and paper and duct tape does them a great disservice. Children can learn real skills, like sewing and carving and leatherworking and knitting and crocheting and knotwork and ceramics. It is radical and empowering to learn these crafts, and it is just as disempowering to only learn elementary-school arts-and-crafts skills.

In this Topology of Enrobement, I'm using the word Folk to mean folks, the folk, as in folk music and and local lifeways. Recipes passed down through families. Music that anyone can sing. Games like tic-tac-toe that anyone can play, and learn, and teach to the next person.

The more I learn about the history of clothing, the more I realize that clothes don't have to be complicated. Consider the universality of the square shirt.

Kimonos and ponchos fall into this category too. When you think of the pre-industrial past, I encourage you not to think about kings and queens wearing lace and robes and pantaloons. Instead, consider billions of human beings wearing squares sewn by their grandmas.

And so, we return to the hood. Simple rectangular shapes, sewn together using any fabric available. Durable, lovable, customizable. Not shitty. Not robotic. Anyone can do it. And it will last.

"The corporate jargon and the greed and the infinite growth model are things that you start thinking about when you get your brain too high into systems. When you ground yourself and you look around at people, you see that human nature is community." - Memoria

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