September 26, 2024 Entrance Slip

Although the excerpt of Common Threads by Sharon Kallis was short, it offered interesting perspectives and questions to think about. The first thing that made me stop was actually neither of these things, but more so a statement that invoked a long-running memory of mine. When the excerpt stated that Vancouver was changing the way they looked at community food gardens, I thought of the many gardens that I would see on my ways to anywhere, most particularly the one that was made in my elementary school during the early 2010s. The intent that was stated to us was to grow food for the school, which even 12-year-old Carson thought was a neat idea. Although I didn't explicitly think of it as "self-sufficiency", I thought about things like infinite energy generators and survival bunkers that could keep people alive forever, and something local that could generate food was exciting, to say the least. That being said, I only remember eating food from the garden once. Every other memory I've had walking past the garden was unfortunately more derelict; I would usually see nobody inside the fenced garden area, only seeing an overgrowth of weeds and uncut grass. Once in a while there would be flowers in the garden beds, but it was a bit disappointing to me considering my initial excitement. An optimistic part of me still thinks that the garden beds are being put to use; not too long ago they installed a bench in the corner of the fenced area, so I think there's still some care being put into it. The statement about gardens being adopted more in Vancouver is still definitely true though. Even if my elementary school garden isn't as active as it was meant to be, many schools have started their own, as well as random block corners across the city. For some of these gardens, I remember the trades program at my school frequently collaborating with the elementary schools that these gardens were meant to be built at, which gave students from both sides a chance to work together in an all-ages environment.

Going back to 12-year-old Carson's dreams of living in a bunker that would even hold off a century-long zombie apocalypse or something of the sort, I also stopped to think when the excerpt asked if we can build cities and towns in such a way to support production and consumption. It made me think of the recent concept of 15 minute cities where everything is accessible to a person within a 15 minute walk, and directly contrasts the suburban hells you would see in many American regions where the closest grocery store is a supersized Wal-Mart 10 miles away with a parking lot spanning a mile, likely getting shipments from halfway across the planet -- a true testament to modern outsourcing and vehicular dependence. As someone who lives around Vancouver's Main street, it's a step in the opposite direction; food, recreation and groceries are all within a short 15 minute walk, and even if something is further there's transit to take me there. It may not completely address the idea of local production effort, but I'm aware that many of these businesses import their supplies and goods from local businesses and manufacturers. One step further we could take is something that I also see on my walks: backyard gardens. When I'm walking in my neighbourhood, plenty of homes have some sort of agricultural endeavour happening. Many benefits are cited, from the benefits of locally-grown ingredients to even exercising the body and soul. I understand that not everyone can just work on a garden, but if we could promote gardening and feeding our local communities, we could also make good use of the land around us without relying on outsourcing. 12-year-old Carson could wise up to the idea as well, if we tell him to think of it like our neighbourhood being a self-sufficient super-bunker or something like that.

There were other good questions posed to the reader, like "ask where things come from", and suggestions and perspectives of backsourcing that my earlier spiel on gardening aligns with. I didn't have too many thoughts when I read these, but I figured that "asking where things come from" is something that I've already been doing as a for-fun daydream or conversation topic. It makes me think of this one time I was at an environmental education 3 days 2 nights elementary school camping trip where they posed the following: "Everything comes from the land." Try as I might, I couldn't really think of anything. Fruits? Clearly from the land. Soda cans? Well, the aluminum is mined up, and all the other ingredients can be traced back to the land. Action figures? Come on. The oil that eventually became the plastic forming these figures comes from hundreds of millions of years of animal processing deep beneath the land. All of these sources are very cumbersome to work with, so backsourcing our production is a nice idea to consider if we wish to promote sustainability and a closer (physically, spiritually, etc.) connection to the land.

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As for the craft techniques, I will say this: I have so much respect for the people throughout the ages for having the basic dexterity and ingenuity to make these ropes, braids, knots, and everything else that you could manipulate fibres into. Initially, I had only skimmed the videos and decided, "Hmm, the multi strand braid looks simple enough with the materials I have while being somewhat complex. The Turkish lace bag thing looks like it would take too much setup, and the first video looks too long." Since it was late, the range of rooms that I could scour were limited, and so too were my materials. So I grabbed a spool of mystery thread (which turned out to be monofilament fishing line of all things...), and asked to the fourth wall: "How hard could it be? The braiding looks simple, it's just repetition!"

...

Let's just say I ate those words. 

This here was an attempt at wrangling together the 7 fishing lines, which were all over the place because of their shape-retaining properties making them naturally curl into a circle. I left this setup overnight in an attempt to straighten the lines out, which barely worked when I came back to it in the morning.

Here, I tried attaching tape strips to the ends of each line. I left a bit of tape exposed so I could pin the lines to the table. This too, did not work. The lines forced themselves as hard as they could to resist my efforts, and I eventually gave up and switched to thread. (Keep in mind it was in the room of someone who was asleep at night, so I couldn't access it before.) The thread was a little better, but was too thin and hard to differentiate with each other, so I couldn't keep track. I think that if I had longer threads, or wider threads, it would've been possible. Perhaps the green tape I added at the ends of each one actually got in the way, and I was going too deep into clever-fying the process. However, I didn't want to waste the thread that I was borrowing, and I realized that I have two left hands.

I decided to give the first video an honest watch, which was the right decision since the rope building ended up being more forgiving. Again though, I could only use the thread from before, which resulted in this rope:

Even this was a bit hard to make, since the threads were all so small. Even though I used 3 different colours, two of the colours were similar, so differentiation was still difficult.

I did have a thought on how I could deal with the problems I had with the two craft activities. Are these not recursive? Both the rope making from video 1 and multi thread braiding output a "rope", and both take in a collection of "rope" shaped components to assemble. My problem of threads being too small could be alleviated by taking the technique from video 1 to make wider ropes, and from there if I made 7 more I could more easily make the multi threaded braid. The reason why I didn't attempt this is once again because I was borrowing the materials -- without permission, if I may add. If scarcity wasn't such an issue, I would've looked into trying it.

Aside from the mathematical elements of chirality and ply, I think there's a basic unit conversion exercise that could come from this. 1 multi threaded braid uses 7 ropes, and each rope uses n smaller ropes. Each of these smaller ropes is actually make from a multi threaded braid that is made from more ropes. How many ropes did we use in total? Also, each of the latter rope is m metres long, and 1 metre of this costs 20 cents. How much are we spending on this super-rope?

I'm just rambling at this point, but you get the idea. A big shout out to the rope makers and weavers of history.