{and a sun-dappled porch for reading on.}

2. this traveling plant.

{because sometimes a houseplant needs a change of scenery.}

3. this pickle jar.

{because we’ve needed all sorts of new habitats this summer.}

4. this honeysuckle.

{because it’s easier to photograph than the hummingbirds.}

5. this bat.

{for still going strong.}

other things:

no-cook dinner on repeat.

we have raised our sails in support of clean water, environmental stewardship, and a more just world.

blueberry cream pie.

hey, you never know.

that violent and infantilizing lie.

a vacationers poll.

Humans haunt more houses than ghosts do. Men and women assign value to brick and mortar, link their identities to mortgages paid on time. On frigid winter nights, young mothers walk their fussy babies from room to room, learning where the rooms catch drafts and where the floorboards creak. In the warm damp of summer, fathers sit on porches, sometimes worried and often tired but comforted by the fact that a roof is up there providing shelter. Children smudge up walls with dirty handprints, find nooks to hide their particular treasure, or hide themselves if need be. We live and die in houses, dream of getting back to houses, take great care in considering who will inherit the houses when we’re gone.

- Angela Flournoy, The Turner House

I’m working from my mom and dad’s house this week and spending time in the four walls that served as the backdrop for so much of my growing up, it’s felt fitting to finally pull together a letter with some of past and present favorite books about home and houses and housing. House books, we can call them, even if no one else does.

The houses in these house books don’t all function as characters per se, but all of the books grapple, even in small or subtle ways, with how we make our homes and how they protect us, or change us, or haunt us. They’re books that one way or another give significance to the meanings that we layer onto walls that hold us, which is, of course, one of my very favorite things to think about.

The full list is below, plus a few books on the subject that my kids have also loved. In this season of reading on beaches and in inner tubes and late into too-warm nights, I’ll also share the book(s) I’ve got packed in my travel bag and hope you’ll all take to the comments to share yours, too.

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This is the third edition of a new MAKE / DO advice column called Solicited Advice. I decided to start this column in response to folks’ increasing reliance on robots when seeking advice or attempting to problem solve. Fie! Let’s talk to each other instead!

One thing about a solicited advice column is people need to be soliciting! If you have a question or a conundrum about how to MAKE / DO, send me a note! 💌 Send queries with the subject line SOLICITED ADVICE to erin @ readingmytealeaves dot com. 💌 I’ll try to give my most human advice and other humans reading along can also chime in in the comments!

What kind of subjects am I most qualified to offer advice on?

• living well in small spaces 🪺

• participating in consumer culture responsibly 🛒

• creative, sustainable solutions for decorating, organizing, and maintenance projects 🔨

• renting, stewarding, and loving the places and spaces we call home 🏚️

• parenthood, esp as it relates to consumerism, creativity, and sustainability 🫙

• living according to our values even when it means going against the grain 🪵

• fixing stuff, making stuff, and generally being scrappy, thrifty, and free! 🪡

Here’s stuff that would be better to ask someone else about:

• brain surgery 🧠

• personal finance, stocks, bonds, and trust funds 📈

• translating ancient texts 📜

This is something of an experiment for me, so please bear with as I figure out the graphic, to say nothing of the exact format and cadence of this new column!

Questions will be published anonymously with a pseudonym and might be edited for length and clarity.

My full responses and participation in the comments section will be limited to paid MAKE / DO subscribers, but free subscribers will be able to read a preview of my response and are also welcome to submit their questions for consideration!

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This week I’ve decided to tackle three distinct queries in a single letter because even though they each peddle in specifics, they all really get at the same universal question of how far to take a repair in a rental apartment.

I’ve written about this before, so I’ll try not to repeat myself too much and I’ll do my best to also offer some inexpert advice regarding the specifics.

Let’s start with the universal:

Before investing significant time or money into a home I don’t own, it’s helpful for me to think about how much I might personally benefit from the repair. Notably, this isn’t the same calculus that a landlord makes. A landlord wants to be able to continue renting a place and making money from it. Generously, we might assume this means that they care about big structural maintenance and broad strokes care rather than the everyday sorts of repairs or improvements that get identified and longed for by the people actually living in a space. A landlord might not think a single crumbling medicine cabinet shelf is worthy of their attention, for instance, but a tenant using that medicine cabinet day in and day out is going to notice the daily decay and celebrate when it’s finally fixed.

It’s not our responsibility as tenants to tackle all (or really any) of these fixes ourselves, but I do think we owe it to ourselves and our spaces to at least attempt to maintain the things that affect our quality of life and experience of a place, even when the landlord won’t.

Before tackling a repair ourselves, it is sometimes helpful to consider at least floating the question of repair or replacement to a landlord. You don’t get what you don’t ask for afterall, and I’ll even go so far as to suggest we can occasionally give the landlord the benefit of the doubt and imagine that they might not be aware of the problem in the first place. There are many kinds of landlords though, and I trust that individual tenants know the limits of what theirs may or may not be willing to do. No doubt it is sometimes easier to do the work ourselves rather than endeavor to magically transform a neglectful landlord into a conscientious one.

If you decide to approach the landlord directly, appealing directly to their pocketbook will be most helpful. A landlord views an apartment as an investment instead of a home, and so creature comforts, valid as they are, are unlikely to stir them. (The fact that the maintenance will improve your comfort is something you can revel in privately.) Saying, “I really hate cooking on this countertop,” might not be terribly effective, but leading with “I’m concerned that without resealing, this concrete countertop will continue to degrade and here’s an affordable service that I found to help prevent a more costly replacement down the road,” could just get you a resealed countertop paid for by the person who owns it. Miracles do exist.

Similarly, finding an affordable replacement medicine cabinet that you can live with and that you think your landlord would pay for, could be worth sharing. “The medicine cabinet in our bathroom is badly damaged, and I found this replacement on sale,” might be just the incentive that would spur a neglectful landlord into action. Of course, if you’re willing to front the money for the improvement yourself, the landlord would just be silly to say no. “Our current medicine cabinet is falling apart and I’d like to replace it with this one, which I am also willing to purchase and install” is hardly something that a reasonable person would say no to. Alas alack, many landlords are unreasonable and quite silly.

In the case of some small fixes and some neglectful landlords, the better option is to skirt the interaction all together. When improving something myself, I tend toward finding a balance between honoring the space and honoring myself. Recently, when repainting the window trim in our apartment, for example, I found that I was dealing with an enormous amount of other people’s past sloppiness. There were paint splatters and caulk streaks all over the metal window frames and removing them proved either impossible or nearly so.The windows in our building are purportedly slated to be replaced within the next year and so I decided the best solution was to bring the paint from the window trim up onto the splattered surface of the metal window frame slightly, thereby covering the sloppiness with a single, neat line of paint. The solution isn’t any worse than it was and it looks far better than leaving the splatters untouched. It’s absolutely not the preferred method, which would have been not covering the metal frames with splatters in the first place and replacing the failing double-paned windows ten years ago, but time travel is not yet a skill I possess and I’m certainly not going to pay to replace the windows myself. The solution I found is one that felt respectful of the property and respectful of my time and energy, too.

In general, I stand by using these five questions as a guide for taking on projects in a rental:

• How likely is this a project that the landlord would deem necessary?

• How likely is it that the job would be handled with care?

• How much expertise does this fix require? (How wrong could this go?)

• How much will this cost?

• How far am I willing to go here?

I’ll also add one more:

• How long am I likely to benefit from this repair?

Our recent experience of being forced to move out of an apartment before we were ready was a very stark reminder that when it comes to renting, there’s simply a lot that’s not in a tenant’s control. Changes in tenant protections and rent stabilization laws means that it’s unlikely many of us will have the experience of someone like my cousin Mildred, who lived as a tenant in the same New York City rental for more than five decades. She enjoyed the cabinets she painstakingly covered with Marimekko contact paper for a good fifty years and no landlord was the wiser. Still, it’s important to consider future plans when investing present-day time into a project. Some of this goes back to the concept of focusing first on high-touch surfaces. I’d tackle a gross medicine cabinet, for instance, before cleaning up a gross radiator. Both projects might be worthy of taking on eventually, but only one of them is the first thing I touch in the morning and the last thing I touch at night. I’ll always decide to do that one first.

Now, onto the specific queries:

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As a kid, some of my school friends belonged to a private beach club of the wood-paneled, oil paintings of ships on the walls, tennis-whites variety. It was (no doubt still is) old-fashioned in many senses of the term and my family, whose main summertime activities involved packing up the minivan and heading to the hills to camp, were decidedly not members. Still, my sisters and I would sometimes get a special invitation to join friends for the club’s bingo nights. We’d code-switch and demur when asked if we sailed and then join the blue bloods at long tables where we all had an equal shot at glory. An ancient person on a wooden stage would turn an even more ancient bingo cage where wooden balls would tumble and rumble pleasantly and we’d wait to hear the numbers on our board bellowed into a crackly microphone.

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This summer’s bingo game will happen without the tumbling balls and hopefully without any of the posturing. The aim is just fun with a side of healthful productivity and cheerleading. I’ve filled the card with some my own favorite summertime activities—floating in inner tubes and sharing popsicles—and lots of my favorite ways to get creative juices flowing, to flex my can-do muscles, and feel tiny bursts of making do satisfaction. A lucky someone will even have the chance at a free year of MAKE / DO.

If you’d like to share photos or stories as you fill up your card, I’ve started a chat. Card download and more details are available to paid subscribers, below. (Checking off your squares with a homemade stamp is not required, but it is encouraged.)

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For summer, here’s a very quick project that creates long-lasting, tangible, moldable, portable joy.

A kneadable eraser—a soft, moldable eraser, standard fare at most art stores—can be pressed onto textured objects and turned into a delightful temporary stamp. Once a print’s been stamped, the eraser can be rolled back into a ball and pressed it onto something new. Joy on repeat.

Making a perfectly sized paper box to fit both a tiny ink pad and the eraser isn’t required for fun to be had, but it definitely ups the cute factor and keeps everything in one place. I’ll be giving these tiny kits to every kid (and adult) I know for the rest of time. Paired with a little notebook, you’ve got the makings for a texture-based travelogue. We’ve already stamped every possible item in our apartment and now we can’t wait to bring these babies on the road.

Below, some of the specifics of what I used to make these little kits, plus some tips I’ve learned along the way. (There are lots of photos below, so the email is long and you might have to click VIEW ENTIRE MESSAGE to get the full post!)

This is free piece for everyone to enjoy. If it resonates with you and you’d like to further support my work, it would be amazing if you could consider:

• Clicking the lil heart ❤️ to help this piece reach more people!

• Sending the link 🔗 to anyone who you think might like it!

• Upgrading to a paid subscription 🪄 to support more work like this (and to have full access to everything else)!

Thank you, thank you!

PS. On Wednesday I’m sending out a MAKE / DO summer bingo card to all paid subscribers. If you’d like to play along, subscribe or upgrade now.

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Kneadable Eraser Stamp Kits

What I used:

Hero Arts Just For Kids 4-Pack: These 1.25” x1.25” ink pads are the perfect pocket-sized ink pads and they come in lots of colors. (Any other ink pad you already have will work, too.)

Faber-Castell Kneaded Eraser - Size Medium: At 1-1/8" x 3/8", the medium size Faber-Castell kneaded eraser pairs perfectly with the mini ink pads. I find this size rolled into a ball and pressed makes a pretty consistent 3/4”-1” stamp which is a size I love for mini notebooks, &c. If you want more surface area, you can always go bigger. You can also always pinch off a smaller piece from a larger eraser. (I can’t vouch for other brands, but Faber-Castell kneaded erasers are PVC-free, which is more than can be said for most squishies!)

Waxed Paper: Many kneaded or kneadable erasers come wrapped in plastic, but in my experience this tears very quickly. I’ve had good luck cutting a square of waxed paper or parchment paper to keep my eraser fresh.

Masu Box: An origami masu box is the perfect vessel for this crafting duo. To make a box sized to fit both ink pad and eraser, start with two squares of paper. One should be approximately 4 1/4” square and the other should by approximately 4 1/2” square. All of the instructions for folding are here, and in Making Things. Once you fold your box, just fit the wrapped eraser into the bottom of the box followed by the ink pad. There’s a little cavity in the bottom of the ink pad, so both fit beautifully into a classic square masu.

Kneadable eraser, ready to be wrapped in waxed paper. You can reuse both eraser and wax paper over and over again.

Origami masu box in progress. You can use tons of different papers to make these boxes, including origami paper, but I especially love repurposing kid art and matte catalog pages. For the box shown here, I used a square of notebook paper I’d covered in a checkerboard stamp.

I put the eraser into the bottom of the box first and then add the ink pad on top.

You can gather your stamping materials or take your box with you as you wander. The sky is really the limit in terms of what you can stamp, but I’ve found the smaller the detail and the more relief, the better!

I always start by rolling my eraser into as smooth a ball as possible.

The best results come when the eraser is pressed quite firmly, but not stretched so thin that it becomes difficult to peel up.

In my experience, smushing the eraser into a circle with about an inch-wide diameter makes for the best results.

When pressing leaves, I have the best luck pressing with the underside of the leaf facing the eraser to maximize the imprint made by the veins.

Peel the eraser up carefully.

When stamping, don’t press so hard that you smush the texture right out.

You want to aim for good ink coverage but a relatively light touch onto the ink pad and paper.

To reiterate: Press the eraser firmly onto a textured surface.

Smush your eraser ball until it flattens to a circle about an inch in diameter and still thick enough to peel up easily

Stamp with light, even pressure to retain the relief.

These high-relief leaves came from the eraser being pressed into the deep grooves of a cut crystal pitcher.

An antique crystal candlestick lamp made another high-relief stamp. Knurled and engraved metal hardware and embellishments also work beautifully, but the experimentation is half the fun.

A classic comb, for example, is very good source for straight, high-relief lines.

Now, off you go!

{for still inking.}

2. these cherries.

{for snacking.}

3. this tablecloth curtain.

{for getting clean.}

4. these little apple.

{because sometimes the backpack dump really is delightful.}

5. these tiny boxes.

{and a new project i’m going to share next week.

other things:

sister ghost ships.

it suddenly seemed so absurd that i hadn’t been flipping light switches.

remember that what happens next is none of your business, really.

nearly every aspect of day-­to-­day life is born lost.

ah, summertime.

are these the only options?

It’s the most wonderful time of the year! School’s out for my kids after tomorrow and so I’m resending and unlocking this piece I wrote two years ago. It’s for anyone needing a bit of support through the onslaught of kids cleaning out their school desks and bringing every grubby scrap of paper home with them!

If the piece resonates with you and you’d like to further support my work, it would be amazing if you could consider:

• Clicking the lil heart ❤️ to help this piece reach more people!

• Forwarding the link 🔗 to anyone who you think might like it!

• Upgrading to a paid subscription 🪄 to support more pieces like this one!

Thank you, thank you!

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Yesterday evening, just as I was about to set a large sheet-tray dinner of black bean nachos on the table for dinner, two of my children unzipped their filthy backpacks and released an actual avalanche of photocopied worksheets, colored pages, half-used composition notebooks and empty folders to the floor. There was such a volume of material that I had to push the piles to the side with my feet so that we could pull chairs out from under the table and enjoy a still-hot meal. Eating while surrounded by a school-year’s worth of work on the floor is not my idea of a perfect June dinner, but then it’s hard to swing a weeknight evening picnic spent listening to the dulcet sounds of a bluegrass band, while sipping rosé and watching children frolic from a distance.

Here in New York City, there are still fully ten school days remaining, but already classrooms are getting emptied of school work and sent home to overwhelm delight parents and caregivers. In our family that’s meant there has been, or will soon be, returned bags of “just in case” clothes from daycare, assorted dioramas of the solar system, posters of famous women writers, hand-drawn comic books heavily featuring invented soccer victories, poetry notebooks, small rubber chickens handed out as reading bribes encouragement, assorted unwelcome containers of slime, one climate-crisis focused, Monopoly-inspired board game, and one incredibly sweet booklet of animal drawings, labeled in Arabic and bound in sparkly ribbon. The Lost and Found at school is full to brimming, at least one previously thought-to-be-lost sweatshirt has returned home wrinkled and suspiciously soggy (?) from closet or cubby, and I know there’s still more coming.

The sum of it is, I’m not ashamed to say, something of a personal nightmare. So many things coming in the door all at once, very little of it with a clear final resting spot, much of it quite loved. In case anyone finds themselves similarly coping with the end-of-school-year onslaught, here’s how I try to keep a handle on it. (As always, if you’re a paid subscriber, your personal success stories and solutions are more than welcome in the comments. If you’re not yet a paid subscriber, we’d love to have you join the conversation!)

Worksheets etc.: Last night after dinner we spent time going through one kid’s ream of school worksheets. We ooo-ed and ah-ed when appropriate, we tried our best to properly read aloud their work when prompted, we absolutely did not correct the repeated instances of frens kicing bols but we did have to howl at the repeated use of the word dammit in speech bubbles. When we finished appraising the worksheets, we gathered them up and save one or two choice examples, we put them unceremoniously into the recycling bin. I intentionally try not to be overly precious about saving these things, lest my children one day have to do what I did well past the age of thirty, and contend with a lifetime worth of school papers. Tonight we’ll do the same for a different kid. Tomorrow, the same. This works for us. Everyone feels seen and celebrated and the apartment does not become a wasteland of grimy kid worksheets.

Artwork: I’m slightly less stoic in the face of a fourth-grader’s cubist self-portrait than I am in front of their multiplication tables, but still, we can’t keep everything. Instead, we try to select, with kids’ approval, a few favorite pieces of art and to slip them into folders at the bottom shelf of the cupboard in my office. One day it will get too full, but we’re not there yet and so we’re not worrying. (I know that lots of folks have chosen to digitize and bind these works into notebooks, which I think is a totally great and laudable thing to do, it’s just not something that I myself do. At least not yet. Maybe not ever. ) If anyone’s feeling particularly woeful that the entirety of their catalog is not being kept in perpetuity, I try to assuage big feelings by hanging more than typical numbers of works on the gallery walls fridge. This usually pleases everyone, and eventually that work is either repurposed into envelopes or boxes, or, if possible, recycled. Larger works, the sculptures, dioramas, and board games are talked about as straightforwardly as possible. Usually I put the onus for figuring out a place to keep something on the child who’d like to keep it. Sometimes this means they need to make room by getting rid of something else. Sometimes the mere task of finding a place to keep something is reason enough to let it go. Often, a kid wants to sleep with their solar system at the foot of their bed for three nights and then they’re ready to part with it. (If not, we patiently revisit the conversation when it’s time to change the sheets, etc.)

To remember: Kid artwork makes for some of the best raw material for making envelopes (and other things!).

Take out your handy-dandy envelope templates and get tracing! There’s something that happens in the process of folding paper into envelopes and boxes that turns even the most humdrum kiddo scribble into something special.

Rose Pearlman and I shared lots of thoughts and ideas for this in our book, Making Things. (If you haven’t gotten yourself a copy for the summer, place that library hold or that bookstore order now! Bookshop.org is running an anti-prime sale this week and offering free shipping!)

Backpacks: Backpacks remain disgusting until the last day of school, at which point I will empty them of their glued-on granola morsels, hi-chew wrappers, and mauled pencils. I soak them in the bathtub with laundry detergent, and hang them to dry on the line. Everyone will use the same backpack again next year.

Coats & Jackets: I imagine most people are not as woefully behind on this as we’ve been this year, but this week we finally took winter jackets to the laundromat for a final wash before storing. (By storing of course I mean keeping in the same place they hang all year—the yellow chifforobe in our living/dining/etc room—only this time, they’ll remain clean for more than a day.) If jackets still fit, they’ll wear them again next year. If they don’t, we’ll sell or hand-down or give away when the season is right and folks are most likely looking. (I also did a winter hat/scarf/mitten inventory and am steeling myself for a wool washing session to avoid any buggy snacking over the summer).

Bookshelves: In hopes of finding school books that we can return to classrooms, last weekend the kids and I went through the bookshelf in their room and whittled it down. This is something we do pretty regularly, but the before-the-end-of-the-year rearrange is particularly satisfying and helps to kickstart conversations about summer reading hopes, dreams and maybe also anxieties. Yay.

Supplies: My kids’ school is currently collecting dried-up markers and pens for recycling.** At home, I’m saving all folders still in good condition to reuse for next year, and am somewhat grumpily taking a craft knife to the written-in pages of composition notebooks, many of which are 80% unused. Pencils are going to be sharpened and along with still-working pens, they’ll go back into the family stash for use over the summer and next year.

Until I’m met with a whole new stash of stuff to contend with this evening, I think that’s it.

**Full disclosure, I’m not totally sure where these collected items are headed. Crayola recently ended its ColorCycle program and the Terracycle Box seems like it would be financially out of reach for our school, but I’ll update this piece when I learn more! Update: I still don’t know where these markers go, but the bins are out in the hallway again this year and I shall be contributing!

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Okay, your turn! Calling any and all genius ways for dealing with the end-of-year desk dump.

PS. In case you missed it, here’s more than a few thoughts I’ve shared before about school supplies and how to make them less wasteful, more equitable, and still fun!

snaps/clasps/clips.

I know that already shared a photo of the brass clasp and my freshly washed and very old tote that I attached it to and I also shared a quick video encouraging folks to do this on Instagram, and I recommended it on Rec League.** Just in case my campaign to get everyone under the sun to sew a lowly brass clasp into their summer tote has not been fully received, I am once again saying that every sturdy beach/park/pool tote needs a key clasp and if it doesn’t come with one, it’s as simple as getting thyself to the hardware store, picking up a clasp for a few dollars, threading it with some ribbon or twill tape and sewing that puppy into your favorite black-hole of a bag. (Rummaging around the house for a clasp you already own is even better!) It doesn’t have to be perfect, it just has to stay put. A brass clasp (or similar!) for every bag, I tell you!

**A new paid subscriber perk is free access to all of my recommendations on Rec League. It’s a fun and easy way to share all sorts of things and some of my favorite internet friends are there, too.

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{for coming through at the eleventh hour.}

2. these colorful blocks.

{for keeping an early riser shockingly quiet.}

3. this kid-offered lavender.

{with apologies to the park it was pilfered from.}

4. this beach/park/pool towel.

{for being even better in person.}

5. this lid.

{for fitting a pan we already owned and turning it into picnic/potluck perfection.}

other things:

solstice in the park.

the most fun place in the world isn’t a luxury box.

two volunteer peach trees out near the compost.

it’s supposed to be fun.

night-walking notebooks.

creative fuel quarterly.

there comes a point where individual choices run headlong into systemic constraints.

PS. don’t forget that if you’re a paid subscriber, you can access all of my recommendations for free. (follow this link for the code!)

I grew up in the age of the landline. The first phone I remember having was a white rotary dial with an old phone number of my parents’ displayed under the plastic center of the wheel. We’d hook our fingers under the receiver cradle and drag that leaden thing as far as we could stretch it—under doors, over furniture, across hallways. In the kitchen, the curly conductor cord of the wall phone was forever tangled or else stretched to nearly taut.

My sisters and I followed strict grammatically correct phone answering protocol. When we placed calls to friends’ houses we were expected to say hello to the parent or sibling of our friend who answered. We waited patiently while little brothers forgot to cover the mouth piece and screamed their sisters’ names into the receiver, or else put it down and simply wandered off. We learned each other’s numbers by heart and I can still rattle off the home telephone numbers of nearly all of my childhood friends. We called each other at home to make plans or to rehash the day’s news. In middle school and high school the conversations got longer and the tying up of the phone line more contested, especially as the dial-up internet began to muck things up.

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When we weren’t home, my friends and I relied on the Main Office phone at school—dial 9 to call out—or the pay phones hung on the side of buildings around town. I tried always to have quarters in my backpack. When I heard the busy signal I’d slam the black receiver and pick it up again immediately, smashing the chrome buttons with increasing ferocity, trying over and over just in case this time the call would go through. If I had to guess a percentage success rate of actually reaching someone at home, I’d say 30. I got my first cell phone the summer before moving to New York City for college. It was the cheapest and smallest flip phone at the store, and I refused to text anyone until I got my first smartphone in 2012.

To no one’s surprise, I have no plans to buy my kids smartphones. On the face of it, my reasoning for this is not complicated or original: I think that childhood and adolescence is best experienced without a screen between the developing pre-fontal cortex and the rest of the world. I want my kids to spend time with books and with balls and with peers unsullied by the algorithmically addictive technologies that profit-driven companies would like to bombard them with. Even small screens, like the kind found on watches, with all of their attending notifications and interruptions are ones I’ve chosen to avoid. Call me old-fashioned, I guess, because that’s really exactly what I’m aiming for.

Still, marrying my own wishes for low-tech childhoods for my kids with the reality of the larger communication landscape provides some logistical challenges.

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{and never again fishing for keys in the bottom of the beach/playground/pool tote.}

2. this freshly washed beach/playground/pool tote.

{which never really gets clean and oh well.}

3. these newly wearable jeans.

{and never regretting anything less.}

4. these sleep shorts.

{and following my own advice to make them.}

5. this ring.

{for almost certainly being a good luck charm.}

other things:

every court in new york city.

cue the collective exclamation points and fireworks.

when humans eat cake, it is in glad times.

unwearable clothes.

all that’s left of you.

fried olives.

yard sale.

joke’s on me, unicorns do exist!

This is the second edition of a new MAKE / DO advice column called Solicited Advice. I decided to start this column in response to folks’ increasing reliance on robots when seeking advice or attempting to problem solve. Fie! Let’s talk to each other instead!

One thing about a solicited advice column is people need to be soliciting! If you have a question or a conundrum about how to MAKE / DO, send me a note! I’ll try to give my most human advice and other humans reading along can also chime in in the comments!

What kind of subjects am I most qualified to offer advice on?

• living well in small spaces

• participating in consumer culture responsibly

• creative, sustainable solutions for decorating, organizing, and maintenance projects

• renting, stewarding, and loving the places and spaces we call home

• parenthood, esp as it relates to consumerism, creativity, and sustainability

• living according to our values even when it means going against the grain

• fixing stuff, making stuff, and generally being scrappy, thrifty, and free!

Here’s stuff that would be better to ask someone else about:

• brain surgery

• personal finance, stocks, bonds, and trust funds

• translating ancient texts

This is something of an experiment for me, so please bear with as I figure out the graphic, to say nothing of the exact format and cadence of this new column!

Questions will be published anonymously with a pseudonym and might be edited for length and clarity.

My full responses and participation in the comments section will be limited to paid MAKE / DO subscribers, but free subscribers will be able to read a preview of my response and are also welcome to submit their questions for consideration!

Please send queries with the subject line SOLICITED ADVICE to erin @ readingmytealeaves dot com.

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Dear Erin:

I am writing in hopes that you can provide some prompts, ideas, and guidelines on how best to talk with our kids about responsible consumption. I am having trouble articulating anything more than “NO! PLASTIC KILLS! DO YOU HATE TREES!?” I have found my panicked “BECAUSE, JUST NO” not quite the conversation I’d like to have when my children beg for ill-considered, cheap plastic toys or polyester garments, but I also feel a little tongue tied when trying to thoughtfully articulate my values around responsible consumption. I would love your advice on this topic. Please help!

Sincerely,

Plastic Peeved

Dear Peeved,

Having only yesterday kneeled onto the tiny plastic head of a decapitated off-brand Lego, I am writing today with particular ire for the plastic industry. As you know, plastics are everywhere. They’re difficult to avoid, not great for our health or the health of our planet, and practically shoved into the hands of our children, even when we do our best to avoid them. If there’s a script to follow, I think simple, straightforward, and consistent is always the best way to go:

Our family tries to limit how much we use plastic because it’s not great for the planet and it’s not great for our bodies.

Because children tend toward the good guy/bad guy binary, I try to be clear on who the enemy is here. When my oldest child was a toddler, they would sometimes precociously question strangers about their plastic use. Understanding that it was something our family tried hard to avoid, they were curious about why other people around them were not making the same choices. It was mildly embarrassing but also a tiny bit cute when my three-year-old peered over the top of a restaurant booth and asked why another patron was using a plastic straw when it could end up in a sea turtle’s nose. A year later, it was much less cute when they came home from pre-k outraged at their classmates for using single-use plastic water bottles and asking me to please speak with their parents.

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There’s a man on a roof I can see from my window scraping paint from a dresser I never saw him hoist skyward.

By afternoon, it’s bare: honeyed wood on a silver platter.

I ride a bike over potholed streets to pierce an awl through paper;

to bind a book,

to meet a friend.

The clouds at sunset appear lit from below with neon purple lights

I expect to wink and change color

GIRLS/ GIRLS/ GIRLS

On the hottest day, teenagers in mismatched bikinis struggle to subdue dancing beach towels.

I want to hand them warm smooth stones,

a plate of cold watermelon,

ballast.

They take shelter behind the bulkhead, send their squeals over the rooftops.

A squirrel on a telephone wire watches a cat.

A six-year-old at a window watches them both.

Three buildings down, a silver-haired man climbs out of a roof hatch and stands too close to the edge.

He surveils his urban kingdom, hands on hips, faded red t-shirt billowing in the breeze.

When disappears back down the hatch I realize I haven’t been breathing.

Maybe all he needed was the wind in his face.

Maybe it’s what I need, too.

{and staying out late with a friend making them.}

2. these newly red shorts.

{even if everything in the load is now a little more pink.}

3. this cake.

{yes i did put dried flowers and black currant sea salt on the frosting and it was delicious and some people didn’t even complain.}

4. this once-dress now-skirt.

{which my six-year-old says makes me look like a picnic (complimentary).}

5. this sake pitcher.

{for keeping small pots watered.}

other things:

the ghosts of just-past manhattans haunt me.

summer jobs.

what makes a moment?

we tried and failed to real simplify.

this heat.

ps. i took the bookbinding class at brooklyn creative reuse!

This is the very first edition of a new MAKE / DO advice column called Solicited Advice. I decided to start this column in response to folks’ increasing reliance on robots when seeking advice or attempting to problem solve. Fie! Let’s talk to each other instead!

One thing about a solicited advice column is people need to be soliciting! If you have a question or a conundrum about how to MAKE / DO, send me a note! I’ll try to give my most human advice and other humans reading along can also chime in in the comments!

What kind of subjects am I most qualified to offer advice on?

• living well in small spaces

• participating in consumer culture responsibly

• creative, sustainable solutions for decorating, organizing, and maintenance projects

• renting, stewarding, and loving the places and spaces we call home

• parenthood, esp as it relates to consumerism, creativity, and sustainability

• living according to our values even when it means going against the grain

• fixing stuff, making stuff, and generally being scrappy, thrifty, and free!

Here’s stuff that would be better to ask someone else about:

• brain surgery

• personal finance, stocks, bonds, and trust funds

• translating ancient texts

This is something of an experiment for me, so please bear with as I figure out the graphic, to say nothing of the exact format and cadence of this new column!

Questions will be published anonymously with a pseudonym and might be edited for length and clarity.

My full responses and participation in the comments section will be limited to paid MAKE / DO subscribers, but free subscribers will be able to read a preview of my response and are also welcome to submit their questions for consideration!

Please send queries with the subject line SOLICITED ADVICE to erin @ readingmytealeaves dot com.

Subscribe now

Dear Erin,

Late last summer we had the very unexpected opportunity to purchase the home directly across from our family. We moved quickly and in a whirlwind we found ourselves in this big, beautiful, turn of the century house. There are more bedrooms than people here, more closets than I know what to do with, cabinets and built-ins around every turn. I know, what a problem to have! But suddenly, we are accumulating more things that can be hidden away with such ease that we tend to forget their existence entirely. Moving into a house twice the size of our last has been overwhelming for me to keep up with in terms of keeping spaces tidy and knowing what I have where. I had never wanted a large home for this reason.

You are famously well versed in small spaces. But do you have any advice for someone who has the opposite predicament? How do you have lots of space…and not fill it? Even more difficult, how do you not fill it when you live with 3 other people who have quite the opposite habit? This was simpler when my kids were young and I was able to steer their spaces, but as they approach the teen years, I want to respect their budding selves and values while also maintaining some sort of sanity. LOL on that one, I know. Any ideas?

Sincerely,

Cluttered Cohabitation

Dear Cluttered Cohabitation,

When I was six, my family moved into an academic-year rental. My parents were searching for a house to buy and the beach town they had their sights on had a fair number of houses owned by wealthy families who used the word summer as a verb and falled, wintered, and springed elsewhere. The kitchen of the house we rented that fall was not especially fancy but it was quite large and with so many cabinets, my mom was able to relegate a whole row of them for exclusive use by me and my sisters. Fancy. Each of us were assigned one cabinet and the drawer above it. The cabinets were where we kept things like our backpacks and lunch boxes and the drawers held things like goodie bag trinkets, or BOOK IT! buttons, or whatever other bits of 90s ephemera we felt strongly about hanging on to. When it came time for us to move less than a year later, we each packed the contents of these drawers and cabinets into packing boxes. I can still see my scrawl on the lid of the cardboard box: Erin’s Jore. And so, it was thanks to this dedicated space that I first came to learn the spelling of the word drawer, and that I first came to value the freedom that can come from limitation and constraint.

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{for making this week’s heat slightly more bearable.}

2. this purple clover.

{for growing near the subway entrance.}

3. these pillows.

{for not being on the floor.}

4. this oregano.

{for going gangbusters.}

5. these jeans.

{and almost working up the nerve to cut them up.}

other things:

there is no feminist case for scaring people into adopting A.I. (gift.)

phone call challenge.

multitudinous patterns.

coming soon: linden szn!

whatever would life be like if we didn't have all this stuff?

This week I shared a quickie before and after video of a window improvement project on Instagram. I like to occasionally share this sort of thing because 1) it’s satisfying to watch a laborious project come together in under a minute and 2) maybe one day a perfectly synergistic, morally upright, and deep-pocketed benefactor will want to pay me for my labor there and 3) because I really do want to encourage all of us to feel confident tackling our own projects. Maybe seeing a little glow-up will be the kick in the bum someone really needs!

When I shared the video, a person who I am very sure is very lovely in lots of ways, expressed dismay regarding the approach I took for this project and gave me some advice for how I might have improved it. It’s not uncommon for folks to offer me their two-cents or unsolicited advice when I share projects on social media and the fact that it still sometimes annoys me is really something I should work on privately. Unfortunately, until I ascend to a higher plane of existence, when confronted with unasked for advice, I’m afraid I will sometimes have no choice but to ooze some big who asked you energy and flounce out of the room. In this particular case however, what what came my way wasn’t any old unsolicited advice. It was advice that had been solicited on my behalf from ChatGPT.

My sisters in DIY:

I do not ever want anyone asking ChatGPT for advice on my behalf. ChatGPT has never attempted to remove caulk from a painted metal window frame in a rented apartment and I don’t want whatever hallucinated mashup of stolen human advice it’s trying to serve me. Disrespectfully, AI is not welcome here!

Still, this person’s advice seeking got me thinking. Sometimes when making do, maybe even oftentimes, advice is welcome and needed. Sometimes we want to tackle a new project, or steel our nerves to try something again, or troubleshoot something we’re smack in the middle of, and a little help or expertise can make all the difference!

No doubt much to Reese Witherspoon’s dismay, I do not think the place to seek that help is from artificial intelligence, but I wonder if we can try something new here. In the spirit of making do, I wonder if it might be nice to experiment with a new regular way that readers can solicit advice about their small household improvements, mending projects, sustainable lifestyle conundrums, &c, &c. I know that forums for advice seeking already exist. Reddit is a cesspool of solicited and unsolicited advice, for instance, so I’m thinking it might be nice to cast about in a smaller pool.

Maybe someone out there wants to suss out whether painting their many kitchen cabinets would be worth it, or whether a pair of jeans could be expanded to better fit, or how to quell their childrens’ desire for disgusting disintegrating plastic stress blobs, or if it might be better to simply cover up someone else’s caulk sins rather than driving yourself crazy trying to get down to a totally blank slate.** (Maybe this person is me.)

If there’s interest, I’m thinking that every other week or so I can choose a query I’m qualified to offer my best advice about and subscribers who have an additional perspectives or experience to share can add those in the comments as well? Maybe sometimes I’ll call an expert to answer what I can’t? Maybe we just give it a shot because collectively we have a lot more to offer than the robots?

Okay, excellent.

If you’re seeking advice about a particular project or problem, shoot me a DM or send a note to erin @ readingmytealeaves dot com and let’s get giving.

**If anyone is dying to know what I decided to do about the caulk…I’m happy to tackle that question first. I do have opinions!)

When we moved to this apartment last summer, my family gained the incredible luxury of a cockroach infestation full-size entryway closet. The closet is now the place where we store coats and shoes and backpacks as well as scooters, helmets, soccer balls, and other things we mostly use outdoors. (Thanks to a high shelf and a step ladder, it’s also a place where we can stash all of our camping gear.)

More exciting (relative) is the fact that gaining this one very useful closet has made way for a second extremely useful closet. Lo, the wardrobe we’d formerly been using to stash coats has a new life as wrangler of kids’ puzzles and games as well as their arts and crafts supplies. This might sound less than thrilling, but for the small apartment crowd, I promise having a dedicated spot large enough for this stuff to fit in all together and be easily accessible was cause for minor celebration.

This week, I gave the craft closet a tiny refresh in the form of expanding two of the shelves and adding a fresh coat of paint to the inside of the doors. As your resident minimalist neatnik, I’m sometimes asked how I handle the could-be chaos of organizing kids’ creative stuff in a small apartment and this week’s project had me taking stock of what helps make a closet like this actually function. I’ll do my best to explain how we organize this shared space to be as sanity saving as possible. First, I have a few thoughts on organizing reality vs fiction:

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{and this book.}

2. this broccoli.

{for lunch.}

3. this paint brush.

{and getting back into it.}

4. all this new growth.

{and the extreme lopping it took to get it.}

5. this iron-rich elixir.

{which i’m low-key expecting will transform me into an entirely new person.}

other things:

i didn’t understand how fundamental the process of breakdown is to the process of growth.

mealtime pacifist.

exhibit no. 001

each knickknack had a story, but i couldn’t hear what it had to say.

carving out personal space.

I can’t recall a single childhood instance of watching a movie with my mother when she didn’t have something in her hands to work on. At the time, this made me disproportionately annoyed. For one thing, it meant she would need the prized seat on the couch, the one directly in front of the small television and next to the only side table and lamp. Worse, it would mean the lamp would need to be turned on. My sisters and I would be settling into the darkened living room to watch a movie and just a few minutes in, our mom would enter the room in a long flannel nightgown, mug of tea in one hand, a 300-page printed manuscript in the crook of her arm, and a pile of sticky notes and pens pinned between the pages and her chest. She’d ask us all to scooch, flip on the lamp, and then settle herself into the corner of the couch to begin editing in hard copy while we watched Shelly Duvall narrate Fairy Tale Theater for the umpteenth time. Even when there wasn’t a work-related task to complete, my mom’s hands were busy—with embroidery floss, or scissors, or Christmas-turned-New-Year cards.

I’ve gallantly held up the tradition of annoying my family by working on projects during family movies. A project in-hand keeps me occupied while sitting through the mind-numbing cinematic choices of my children, but more importantly, it prevents me from the uniquely modern temptation of being on my phone.

There’s lots to hate about the small screens that have taken over our lives, but one of my pet complaints is that we have to hold them to the exclusion of other things! Idle hands are the devil’s workshop maybe, but hands occupied by a phone are surely something even worse. The ceaseless scroll of our thumbs up and down a glass screen give us the sense that we’re doing something when really we’re giving over the motility of our very capable hands (to say nothing of our minds) to an algorithm that routinely makes us lust after things instead of making them. So many of us have grown so accustomed to our scrolling habits that even when we’re watching something of our own choosing, or riding the subway, or sitting in a waiting room, we’re more likely to have a phone in hand than anything else.

This is a long way of saying that recently when my own scrolling demons brought me first to an algorithmically targeted swimsuit collection and then to zhuzhed-up earphones being sold in colors complimentary to those suits, I realized it was time to put down my phone and pick up my embroidery floss.

The fact that I’d never before felt the need to improve my simple wired earphones, and that earphones are not something that typically come to mind when I think of either beach lounging or aquatic recreation, did not stop me from being charmed by the sandy imagery of the cloth-wrapped wires. They evoke the floss-wrapped hair of my 90s youth and friendship bracelets, both, and if you’d like to spend less time scrolling on your phone, they’re a very good gateway project for occupying body and brain during moments of relative downtime. I have now wound many feet of embroidery floss—while watching a tv show, while riding the subway, while working backstage at the elementary school musical—slowly turning them into the delicate clothbound cords of my temporary internet lust.

Even better, this particular project led me to a different and arguably more impactful use of my wire winding energies.

Last summer, when we were in the process of moving to our new apartment, we visited one of my sisters and my kids became enamored with their cousins’ glowy salt lamps. I bought one in an effort to offer a warm welcome to their barely unpacked room. I’ve been mildly bothered by its bulky black cord ever since.

Never willing to leave blah-enough alone, over the winter I attempted to crochet over the cord, but found the result to be bulky and eye-catching in the wrong way. I briefly considered sewing a quick cord cover from scrap fabric, but I knew I would also find it busy and fussy, no matter how pared down I tried to make it. It wasn’t until I started needlessly wrapping my earphones in embroidery floss that it occurred to me I could do the same for the thick black cord of the lamp. In the end, I decided to use thin hemp twine because I had a fair amount of it and because it would help disappear the cord against the white wall.

The finished result is prettier, softer, and more subtle than anything else I’ve tried and importantly, an actual improvement on the original black cord. Happier still, the whole thing was completed during a single viewing of The Testament of Ann Lee, and, well, I think she might even approve.

This being a DIY, I won’t claim perfection. I didn’t bother, for instance, to swap the switch to something prettier, though with wire strippers in hand, I certainly could have. Even though I attempted to wrap slowly and neatly, there are some small gaps in the thread and places where the black or white wire peeps out. These are simply not things I’m worried about. Both endeavors have been so relatively easy and satisfying that I’ve taken to scoping out other cords that might need improvement. Finally, since I am quite certain someone will ask, I will say that because the lamp cord is very well insulated with many layers of polymer and plastic sheathing, I wrapped my cord in a layer of hemp twine without fearing combustion. If the insulation on any of my cords were damaged, I would have replaced them before wrapping.

I promise you don’t need a tutorial for any of this, but I’ll share a few tips in case they’re helpful.

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