Featured This Week: The Woodworkers' Guild!

Hey all! I'm trying a new thing this week where I work on the newsletter a little bit each day instead of trying to write the whole thing on Thursday. If I haven't changed this intro paragraph before sending it out, let's assume it worked 🤣

Events on the Horizon:

• Friday, April 17th, 12-1pm - Dance for Democracy at the Weathervane! Bring your signs, visit with your neighbors, and dance the stress right out of your body.
• Friday, April 24th, 12-1pm - Dance for Democracy at the Weathervane! Bring your signs, visit with your neighbors, and dance the stress right out of your body.
• Saturday, April 25 12-4 - Earth Day Lakeshore in Grand Haven - Gather for the Green March at noon (Ottawa Co. Courthouse Parking Lot) bring signs/banners to walk/bike the route. 1-4pm is an indoor fair and outdoor electric vehicle expo at the First Presbyterian Church Grand Haven.
• Sunday, April 26, 1-4pm - Trash Bash, a community wide clean-up! Meet at the Chamber of Commerce (124 W. Hanson St. in Whitehall) at 1pm for brief instructions. All ages and group sizes are welcome. Dress for the weather and task (long sleeve shirt, sunscreen, gloves, hats, etc.) Trash bags supplied.
• Friday, May 1st, 12-1pm - Dance for Democracy at the Weathervane! Bring your signs, visit with your neighbors, and dance the stress right out of your body.
• Friday, May 1st, 1pm-7pm - May 1st Solidarity Festival! Come down to the Artisan Market to meet your neighbors, learn more about our guilds, do some karaoke, and enjoy a potluck picnic dinner.
• Thursday, May 7th, 11am-1pm - Open Studio time at the Nuveen Art Center! Get to know other local artists while you work on whatever you'd like.

Artisan Market Progress

Nate and I spent Friday afternoon getting the rest of the pegboard up in the Artisan Market cabin. It was hot and noisy, and I forgot to take any in-progress pictures, which was a shame because we figured out a pretty cool system for making accurate cuts in the pegboard. Hopefully future pegboard-hanging opportunities will eventually arrive...

Most of my time this week went towards painting the pegboard to make the cabin feel brighter. Eventually I'd love to do some subtle mural work on the pegboard panels, but for this year I'll be happy to get an even coverage of white paint. (As you can see from the picture above, I'm not quite there yet after coat #3.) Next step is bringing down a ladder and hanging some additional lights. We got a lot of comments last year about the cabin looking dark from the outside, and we want people to be able to see all the cool stuff we've got.

Announcing: May 1st Solidarity Festival!

Technically, the Artisan Market proper doesn't open until May 9th. But there's no way we're missing the opportunity to have our Grand Opening on May Day.

May 1st marks the halfway point between the Spring equinox and the Summer solstice in the northern hemisphere, and it's been a traditional festival day for thousands of years. Since 1889, it's taken on the added significance of International Workers' Day, in honor of the Haymarket strikers who were killed while advocating for an 8-hour work day. And this year, organizers around the country are encouraging people to participate in a one-day boycott of the investor-driven economy to show the powers that be that we will not participate in business as usual while our democracy crumbles. No work, no school, no shopping. The more people join in, the bigger the message it sends.

We want to take that idea a step further: instead of simply withdrawing from the capitalist economy, let's spend the day demonstrating what an alternative could look like.

After the protest on May 1st, head down to the Artisan Market Village to get first crack at all the cool stuff we've been making over the winter. We'll have all our various upcycling projects available for people to try, and you can drop off anything you've been saving from our useful stuff list. You can learn more about our various guilds, and meet some of the not-me people involved in them. (I'll be there too, but I'm pretty sure most of you already know me by now.)

Most importantly, you can spend the day in the solidarity economy instead of the capitalist one. Bring a dish to the potluck, or help make soup over the fire. Help scrub the winter's grime off the cabins, or split some firewood for the sugarbush. From cutting up plastic bags to singing karaoke, there are a hundred different ways to contribute to building a cool experience for the community, and we hope to get as many people involved as we can.

We'll be hammering out more of the details over the next week, so if you're got a project that you'd like to share with the community, let us know.

Token Painting Kits are now available to borrow!

After nearly twenty hours of sewing over the past couple of weeks, the first non-prototype generation of token painting kits are ready to head out into the world. These kits include an assortment of acrylic paint markers, held in a convenient roll-up fabric case with a pocket big enough to hold a couple of blank tokens. They also have labels identifying each kit and explaining the guidelines for the tokens.

These kits, as well as blank tokens, are currently available for pickup at the Art Center, and will be rolling out to more local spots as we finish more blank tokens. I'll also be doing a writeup at some point of how I made the distribution boxes out of yard signs and duct tape. They came out nice and sturdy, and I think they're a nice size for the purpose.

Speaking of blank tokens: The Woodworkers' Guild!

Who we are:

• Members of Montague Commoners who enjoy woodworking, and want to use our skills to help the community.

We think everyone should have:

• Access to furniture that fits their body, their living space, and their day-to-day needs.
• Access to the tools and mentorship they need to make the things they need out of wood harvested from the local waste stream.
• The opportunity to gather with other people interested in preserving traditional woodworking techniques and and work side-by-side so that we can learn from each other.

So we take responsibility for:

• Making the blank tokens for the Commoners' Hour program
• Working towards a future community woodshop
• Rescuing useful wood that might otherwise go to waste and holding onto it until it comes in handy

We frequently work with:

• The Artists' Guild - We provide them with blank tokens for the Commoners' Hour project.
• The Firewood Guild - They give us logs that might have woodworking potential, and we give them scraps that would make good firewood. (Also, so far there's basically a 100% overlap in membership 🤣)
• The Treespeaker Woods Guild - We harvest wood for tokens from saplings that need to come out anyway for the health of the overall forest. We help plant trees that are going to be useful to woodworkers in future generations. They give us first dibs on storm-felled trees in case there are any parts with strong woodworking potential.

We're looking for people who want to:

• Find branches ~1.5-4 inches in diameter and cut them into wood cookies with a 0.25-0.325 inch thickness. What can we say, right now we are a guild with highly particular tastes 😉 Seriously, we have a LOT of hour tokens to make and we could use all the help we can get. Email me if you want to know the tips and tricks we've figured out over the first three or four hundred tokens.
  • Bonus points if you've got a benchtop sander and you'd be up for helping to sand tokens after we've done the woodburning stamps.

Our long-term dreams include:

• A community woodworking shop where members can work on individual and group projects, get input and mentorship from other members
• A portable bandmill and a well-trained team that knows how to use it, so that we can use local storm-felled trees to their greatest potential.
• A local circular economy that can turn a downed tree into useful wooden goods for the community without wasting a bunch of energy shipping it all over the country/world.

If any of that sounds interesting to you, start making some wood cookies and bring them to the May 1st Solidarity Fest! The roadside is full of good branches right now and Rob and I can't cut them all up on our own.

Recommendation Corner

Cory Doctorow is someone whose work I've followed for a very long time. In the early 2000s, we shared a sense of optimism about the potential represented by open and collaborative projects springing up around the internet. 25 years later, we share a deep anger at the selfish assholes who gained a lot of money and power by ruining that dream. And we share a determination not to let them win. I've plugged at least one of his books here before, but this week I wanted to specifically plug his daily newsletter. His writing is very accessible, but it's also based on a lifetime of work in the world of digital privacy and freedom. He makes the occasional mistake, but he's not a bullshitter, and he doesn't play to an algorithm. If you feel like you'd like to have a better sense of what's going on with the tech world right now, he's someone that I'd strongly recommend.

This week's nails art project

Didn't get a chance to do my nails this week, so in lieu of nail art I offer some drum art! This one is still a work in progress. I've put in 8 hours so far, and I'm expecting to put another 6-10 hours into layers of detail and adornment before it's finished. This is the second piece in my Empty Center Drum series, and I'm trying to get done in time to submit it to MiCAN's Collective Courage exhibit for their summit in June.

Pre-meme-ium Content

Not paywalling anything useful is pretty important to the whole Montague Commoners ethos, but we do want to offer a bonus to folks who support this newsletter with a paid subscription. (And subtly remind the rest of you that it's a thing you can do 😉) So I'm trying a new thing, and if I've done it correctly, paid members should be able to see a small curated collection of top-quality memes after the paywall break. (It also might show the memes to everyone who's subscribed to the newsletter but hide them from folks who aren't logged in? It's my first time trying this. Let me know how it worked.)

If you live on less than $35k/year, let me know and I can hook you up with a free membership so you can see the memes too.