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A Tale of Banners and Blackouts

A Tale of Banners and Blackouts

Hey all! Sorry that the newsletter's a little late this week, as you might be able to guess from the subject line, it's been a logistically challenging week 😅

This Week in the Commons

My big project this week was making a new banner for the Dance for Democracy protests on Fridays. A friend recently found me a few sheet sets at an estate sale, and I've been meaning to banner-ize them for a few weeks now. I had some high-fatigue days this week that made it hard to do anything strenuous, so I decided it was finally time.

A large piece of freezer paper with the outline of some large letters reading "if you"

The first step in making a banner is tracing the message onto some freezer paper. Freezer paper is similar to waxed paper, but it has one uncoated side. This makes it great for stenciling on fabric, because you can iron it onto the surface of the fabric and it will hold reasonably well while you apply your paint. I do enough stencilling work that I bought an LED lightpad a few years ago, which makes things much easier. I taped a sheet protector to the surface of the lightpad, so I can easily slide whatever I'm tracing into the sheet protector and it will be held in place securely. I also have an A-Z set of giant letters that I printed out when I made my first sheet banner a few years ago, so I can use them to spell out whatever I need.

A pair of hands holding the freezer paper from the previous image and cutting out the letters with an exacto knife

Next, I used an x-acto knife to cut out all of the letters. One fun thing about freezer paper stencils is that you actually end up with two stencils, because you can use the letters that you cut out to do a second negative-space stencil if you want to. It's a technique I use a lot for tshirt stenciling, and it can give you some really cool results.

A large satin-striped sheet folded in half and laying on a rough wooden floor

The next step was ironing the stencil onto the sheet. This involved playing furniture tetris to make enough space on the floor to lay everything out, and then carefully laying out each line of the stencil to make sure everything would fit. From there I ironed the freezer paper onto the sheet, using a hot but constantly moving iron. I've always gotten the best results that way. There are other stencilers out there who prefer low heat and a stationary iron, so I can only assume that it depends at least a bit on your particular ironing setup. Try everything and see what works best for you 🤷 Finally, I took all the "floating" stencil bits, like the middles of O's and the inner triangles of A's, and ironed those in the right spots. Being able to do this is one of the big advantages of freezer paper stencils. It eliminates the need for those little lines that make stencils look obvious. The drawback is having to keep track of a bunch of escapey little letter bits while you cut out and iron the rest of the stencil.)

Apparently that stage was annoying enough that I completely forgot to take any pictures between laying out the sheet and being half way through painting, so you'll have to use your imaginations. Whatever you're imagining, make the stencil about 200% more determined to either roll back into a scroll, or tear into multiple pieces and escape to Tierra del Fuego.

The banner in the middle of being painted. Some of the stencil letters have been painted in, and some are still blank.

For paint, I used an old jar of black screenprinting ink that I've had since college. It's far too congealed at this point to use for actual screenprinting, since the screen would get clogged pretty quickly, but it works pretty well for this sort of thing because it bonds well with fabric and doesn't run.

You'll notice in the picture that the stencil is lifting up a bit from the fabric in the middle of the 'N'. It's inevitable on a piece this size that there are going to be a few spots that don't get ironed as thoroughly as the others. Luckily, it didn't effect the final quality of the print, because of the most important tip I can pass along about this sort of stenciling: always brush away from the edge of the stencil, never towards it. You want every brushstroke to start on the stencil paper and end on the fabric. That way, even if the paper isn't 100% secure on the fabric, paint won't be pushed under the stencil. The fabric under the loose bit gets protected by the "shadow" of the stencil, even if the stencil isn't attached. We'll probably do a stenciling day or two this summer at the Artisan Market, so if none of that made sense you'll be able to see it in person then. Figuring out how to word about the art stuff is hard 😆

The banner with the stencil being removed. The lines of each letter are smooth and clean, except for one little blip on the bottom of the last E.

Once the paint was close to dry, I peeled off the stencil to reveal the final print. No matter how many of these I do, there's always a part of me that's sure I'm going to pull the stencil off to find a gloppy mess. The painted stencils always look fairly chaotic, and there's probably some teenage part of me from before I learned the "brush in, not out" technique that remembers a ruined project or two. But sure enough, the stencil worked, and I had a great new banner that I would be able to bring to Dance for Democracy on Friday. All I had left was ironing the paint to set it, and then sewing the edges and the sleeves for the poles.

At that point, the power went out.

Here in the White Lake area, we were on the northern edge of Thursday night's thunderstorms, and all told there wasn't much damage here in town. But a branch must have knocked something loose nearby, because about a hundred of us north of the high school lost power for nearly four days. Statewide, about a hundred and eighty thousand people lost power, including huge swaths of Kalamazoo and Lansing, so we weren't particularly high on the priority list. I've noticed that we tend to get our power back once the statewide number affected drops below 40k or so, so it's nice to know where we stand 😄

Nate and I have been iterating on our household power outage preparedness for five or six power outages now, and it was nice to realize that we've pretty much got it down. We've got lots of USB batteries and a small solar generator, so keeping phones, lanterns, and headlamps charged wasn't difficult. But I definitely wasn't going to going to be ironing anything for a while.

(Incidentally, if there's ever a major local disaster, absolutely feel free to come over to our house. We have a lot of community preparedness supplies, and we'll be doing our best to make sure everybody has food, water, heat, medical supplies, etc.. Once we get things running smoothly at the Artisan Market my next organizing project is going to be restarting the community preparedness discussions and building a toolkit for people who want to help organize preparedness in their own neighborhoods.)

Dance for Democracy went relatively smoothly this week, but if anyone here knows this gentleman, he could really use some community support in finding a new hobby. Teach him how to fly fish, or offer to play tennis with him or something. Right now he is absolutely pickling his brain watching the Fox Business Network and he made a real pest of himself at this week's protest. Nate qualified for sainthood by talking to him for 20 minutes so that he'd leave the rest of us alone. Hopefully he's a tourist and this was the last we'll see of him, but if he is a local, I'd like to get him the help he needs.

Week 2 of the Artisan Market went pretty well, despite the inclement weather. We were able to add some new products from Winter's Woodland Wonders, and our communications lead Mickkayla, whose posts many of you probably see on Facebook and Instagram, helped spruce up the retail display. We still haven't sold anything, but I don't really expect to until we get more of the time trading system up and running. (More on that in future weeks.) Besides, the longer we go without selling anything the longer I don't have to fill out sales tax paperwork 🤣

Coming Up Next Week

  • Wednesday, 6-7pm at Fetch Brewing - Fish for the Future! White Lake Area Climate Action Council is working with groups across the country to fold origami fish and raise awareness of the fight against the Line 5 oil pipeline, which runs through the Mackinac straits and severely threatens the health of the Great Lakes. The more fish we make, the easier it is to get local and national media to cover the fish drive, and in turn to get them to talk about Line 5. Plus, you never know when the ability to turn a piece of paper into a toy fish might come in handy. So come hang out with us at Fetch and learn to fold a fish 🐟
  • Friday, 12-1pm at the Weathervane - Dance for Democracy! Come see the new banner in action, and learn some new songs. We're up to 50 or 60 people on the average week now, and it's always a fun time.
  • Saturday, 9am-2pm at the Artisan Market - Come check out our booth! The activity this week is probably going to be a tarp repair clinic, so bring any old tarps that you'd like to patch up. If you help patch up tarps that aren't yours, you can earn hours that you can redeem for baskets, Tshirts, and more at our Artisan Market booth.
  • Also Saturday, 2-4pm at the Farmer's Market - WLACAC is doing one of their Electronics Recycling events! Now is the perfect time to gather up those old cables and cell phones and make sure those critical minerals can find new life in new electronics instead of languishing in a landfill. They take just about everything that plugs into the wall, but there are a few exceptions you can learn about here.

Plant of the Week

A carpet of small green plants with radial clusters of leaves and small white flowers

This week's plant is Sweet Woodruff. It's blooming in my lawn right now, so it's probably available somewhere near you as well. If you cut a few stalks and dry them in a bundle, they smell great and make a natural potpourri. It can be used as a culinary herb, or in teas. It's not a native plant, but it's not aggressively invasive either. It tends to just do it's own thing and leave space for its neighbors.

Solidarity Steps

When Nate and I bought this house in 2021, it didn't come with any kitchen appliances. We were fairly overwhelmed by the choices available when it came to choosing a new fridge, so we used EnergyStar ratings to narrow down our options to the most energy efficient fridges that fit the space in our kitchen. We mostly did it because we didn't want to pay for more electricity than we absolutely had to, but this week during the power outage we discovered another advantage. We left the fridge closed the entire time the power was out so that we wouldn't let any cold air out or warm air in. We don't keep much meat on hand, but we do go through a lot of dairy, so we had three or four bottles of milk in there. As the power outage stretched on, we expected to have to use most of it as fertilizer in the garden. (If you ever do this, water it down a fair amount first so your garden doesn't end up smelling like old milk.) But when the power came back on and we finally opened the fridge, the milk was fine! Even the opened, mostly empty bottle. It was still cold! The thermal mass of the cold milk and the top-notch insulation of the energy efficient fridge meant that the temperature of the fridge only went up a few degrees over the course of the whole blackout.

Why is this story in the Solidarity Steps section? Because the current administration is trying to gut the EnergyStar program. They want to send us back to the days when we just had to take the manufacturer's word about whether a given appliance was energy efficient. We need to contact our legislators and tell them how important EnergyStar ratings are to rural communities who experience regular power outages.

(While you're at it, tell them to vote against the Guiding and Establishing National Innovation for U.S. Stablecoins Act. Crypto is a complete scam, and I say that as someone who was mining dogecoin in 2014. We shouldn't be giving US government backing to worthless techbro feverdreams just because they've scammed enough money from retail investors to pay for lobbyists.)

Recommendation Corner

Bit of a different recommendation this week, and that's the most recent episode of the Hex Positive podcast. It's a deep dive on the importance of fact checking and critical thinking in online witchcraft spaces. It goes over how to evaluate the credibility of a source, the red flags that can help you spot misinformation, and where to draw the line between subjective spiritual matters and objective factual ones. Even if you're not into the witchcraft/woo scene, it's an interesting perspective that you might not have run across elsewhere.

Concession to Capitalism

Have you noticed that we're all still trapped in a dystopian hellscape where it costs money to do anything, even if that thing benefits the community and doesn't require much in the way of resources? Hopefully we can fix that eventually. In the meantime, Nate and I are still paying most of the costs of Montague Commoners out of pocket, and that's a smaller problem to fix. The annual hosting cost for this newsletter is about $120, and it would be great to get that covered by the folks who enjoy reading it every week. You can sign up to throw us a few bucks a month over on our Ko-fi page.

This Week's Nails

You made it to the end of the newsletter! Congrats, it was a long one this week. That means you get to see this week's nails. I stuck to something simple given everything else I was juggling this weekend, but the white is very pearlescent and sparkly and I'm enjoying it. Hope you stay dry during the rain this week, and I'll see you next weekend for tarp repair.