starting.

It turns out it's hard to start a blog, especially if you're worried about coming across as pretentious, which is my constant fear.

However, emboldened by bourbon, here I go.

So, man.craft, right, what's up with that?

I'm a dude who reads a lot of craft blogs. See blogroll. I am really interested in the intersection of utility and beauty, and I think for the most part the ladies I read find that place in really awesome ways.

Here are some things about me:
- my mom taught me to sew when I was a kid, and I am extremely grateful for that. I am a freakishly tiny guy (probably I should create a tag for that, since I have a feeling it will become a theme), and it sure is handy to be able to alter clothes-- although to be honest it is extremely handier to have a good tailor, which I do.
- more often, though not often enough, I use my sub-mad sewing skills on things like machine quilting, which I enjoy a lot but don't entirely have the attention span for. One of the goals of this blog is that it will help me focus and motivate to do these things I love but forgo in favor of, say, mocking the internet. Most recently, though not really recently at all, I've made a quilt for an ex-girlfriend (yeah, I know. I totally know.), which looked like this:

and one for a friend of mine with wildly different taste from mine, which looked like this:

I'm a big fan of denyse schmidt and her awesome restylings of traditional patterns. I love solids. Also, hi, the pillows over at glittergoods are amazing.
- Evidently I'm wordy.
- I bake things, and cook things, but I'm not sure how relevant that is here.
- I really don't know how this blog business is supposed to work
- This seems long already.
- Last summer I built a boat. I put a glass bottom in it, then took it to Florida and paddled a bunch of spring fed rivers. Basically, it was awesome, and I will talk about it at length if given the opportunity.
- This summer, I acquired two antique wooden rowboats. One of them is about a hundred years old, and of unknown provenance from the Adirondack area. The other is a fourteen foot Old Town (think canoes) lapstrake rowboat built in 1931:


They are both oak frame with cedar siding.

The plan, and probably the topic of this blog for awhile, is to restore them both and get them in the water. Additionally, I paid ten bucks for a 1953 Sea King outboard motor, and I'm in the process of restoring that. It'll go on the Old Town, provided I can unfreeze the cap screws holding the lower unit together and actually get it going.