It's nice to meet you! I'm Andy (they/them) 🏳️⚧️ and I'm a nonbinary adult in the pacific northwest and I have a million hobbies, mostly books and fibercrafting (knitting, spinning, weaving, nålbinding, dyeing, everything) but now coding too.
Check out pictures of my cat, Bezoar, and my portfolio of textile projects.
07/2025
I adopted the park around the corner from me, which mostly means I'm pulling invasive plants and replanting more natives. Mostly this means peeling English Ivy (hedera helix ) off the trees like carpet and leaving it to dry out in the sun.
I've been doing this for about a month now, at 8 hours a week (50 gallons of invasives pulled each week) but the whole wooded area of this park is about 4 acres according to google earth, so of course I've made barely a dent.
But I will say that doing this has really helped me live in place with my values. Let me explain: when I was in middle school there was a story that my class passed around (as you do) as sort of a very regional mythology of humanity's origin. At its core, it was "what if the asteroid that hit Earth and killed the dinosaurs was actually a spaceship full of humans coming to colonize the planet?" Not particularly unique or creative, but I think it says a lot of the culture and assumptions we had: humans are not from here, we don't belong, and we cause massive extinctions and huge swathes of destruction everywhere we go from the second our feet touch the soil.
Kind of a bummer, right?
Now keeping that in mind, did you know that avocados were spread by giant sloths? They were the only things with a big enough anus to poop out the seeds and keep the plants alive. So why are they still around? Human agriculture in South America. Even on a much smaller scale, you can make fabric and cordage with nettle (it's a lot like linen) and the enzymes in human saliva actually breaks down proteins in the bast fibers and make a stronger string which makes a stronger fabric, which makes our survival more likely which means we'll keep thinning out these plants and spreading their seeds. Kind of sounds like a system we fit into, right? When I first heard that I felt very emotional, which cued me into the fact that I really am very hurt by the idea that we are just aliens come to destroy everything, even just by landing.
I've been reading books with a strong ethnobotany focus (ethnobotany bookshelf ) like "Braiding Sweetgrass" by Professor Robin Wall Kimmerer (Potawatomi) and "Plants Have So Much to Give Us, All We Have to Do Is Ask" by Mary Siisip Geniusz both of these books show a world where individual people have a push and pull, give and take relationship with the physical world directly surrounding them, and one that argues and imagines a world where groups of people do this. And I want that. They paint a beautiful picture that feels so close, just within reach.
Yesterday I pulled 25 gallons of invasive species, 5 gallons of trash, and lined part of a creek bed with felled trees and sticks. I'm planning to add dirt and mulch over the bank and start planting redwood sorrel which will stabilize the bank, is edible to humans, and blooms early in the year so will help pollinators re-emerging after winter.
