Antique book restoration

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"I repaired several books for Laura -- four volumes of a mid-18th century collection of English poetry edited by Samuel Johnson, and two volumes of an early 19th century French natural history encyclopedia. They weren’t in bad shape for books that old, just some detached or loose covers and damage to the leather. I reattached or strengthened the covers with Japanese kozo paper and wheat starch, and tried to arrest the leather deterioration with a cellulose ether. Those are both pretty quick processes, gentle to the books, completely reversible (important for books that have value), and not very visible. It was a fun project."  Simon Mauck 7/11/17

"We have such a variety of talents in the timebank.  It was great to discover Simon who used to work at the Harvard Rare Books Archive.  I have a few very old books from my grandparents, and I'm happy that they have gotten some expert attention."  Laura 7/11/17

Patio pillows are a hit

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I attended the timebank's Kitchen Swap in April and found a set of napkins and placemats from World Market.  I grabbed them, thinking they looked like the same size as my outdoor pillows which have faded from the sun.  I put the Request on hOurworld to have someone re-cover my pillows with this new fabric.  Connie answered my request.  She sized them exactly, and they were much nicer than they would have been if I had done them myself.   In fact, one of her friends saw them and tried to buy them from her!  I'm so happy with my "new" pillows, and I love that I got to upcycle items from the Kitchen Swap.   -- Kathy J., 6/27/17

Kitchen Swap: April 2017

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WE ASKED ATTENDEES, "WHAT DID YOU FIND TODAY?"

  • When you have an icemaker, you don’t tend to hold onto ice cube trays. But I found a great one here with smaller compartments which will be good for freezing herbs and herbal concentrates. –David
  • I was thrilled to find this asparagus cooker! My girlfriend has one, and she swears by it. –Robin
  • I came here hoping to find a few things, and I found most of what I wanted: a pressure cooker, a trivet, a wine opener. –Mary
  • I’m always on the lookout for good reusable water bottles, and I found a set today. I fill them with tap water and keep them in the fridge so the kids will always have cold water available. –Karen
  • My toaster just broke. It’s fortuitous that I found a toaster here today to replace it. –Marjie
  • I found these adorable turquoise cactus-shaped salt and pepper shakers that I’m going to send to my son and daughter-in-law in Austin. –Naomi
  • I made out like a bandit! I got this opener, some ice tongs, and a swiffer. And I took back the sushi wrapper I brought because I might use it after all. –Eugenia
  • I couldn’t believe my eyes! I found Revereware and grabbed it. It’s amazing to find it here. Some of mine is older, and now I can switch it out. –Wendy
  • Some old housemates moved out, and they took some kitchen things with them that I was able to replace today. But my real find is this book on growing and cooking vegetables. One of those who moved out was in charge of the garden, and this will help the rest of us bring it back. –Rebecca
  • We live in such an African area, and I don’t know the first thing about African cooking. So I’m glad I found this cookbook. –Rita
  • I’m excited because I found a set of plates in the shade of blue that I’m currently obsessed with. –Christy
  • I got a pan with a cover that will be good for frying my gallo pinto – rice and beans. –Oswaldo
  • I picked up some useful odds and ends for the kitchen that I wouldn’t bother going out to buy. My son Xavier is shopping for shiny things. –Beth
  • I got a few things here, but I’m even more excited about all the stuff I brought today – and got out of my kitchen! –Dana
  • We found these coasters that make us happy. –Nancy
  • In our various moves, we lost track of our cheese slicer. I found one here, and I’m so very happy. Sometimes, you just want to slice some cheese, for cheese melts on sandwiches and other things. –Andrei
  • I live by myself, but somebody – I don’t know if it’s a ghost or what – keeps stealing my spoons! I can’t find them. I don’t know where they go. Now I have some spoons to bring home. –Saunya

The SSTB was happy to donate any remaining swap items to A Wider Circle.  

Member Spotlight: Mentoring and being mentored

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Jessica Arends uses the Silver Spring Timebank to improve her carpentry skills even as she offers those same skills to others.  

 

There are times when we want to call in an expert and have her just do whatever needs to be done: shorten the trousers, unfreeze the computer, install the new wiring. And then there are people such as Jessica Arends, a former high school English teacher who joined the Silver Spring Timebank when she moved back to the D.C. area last year.

For Jessica, the Timebank is not just a way to get something accomplished—it’s a way to learn how to accomplish that task herself. “I don’t really use it as it’s sort of meant to be used-- I push on the boundaries a little bit,” she said. “I use it as a learning tool.”

The result is that Jessica, who holds a doctorate in curriculum and instruction from Penn State and serves as faculty engagement associate for the Center for Civic Engagement at Binghamton University, is becoming, as she puts it, more “blue collar.” “I use [the term] interchangeably with, ‘using your hands,’ because ‘blue collar’ can also be a class statement or a political statement, and I don’t mean it that way,” she said.

In particular, Jessica is using the Timebank to improve her carpentry skills even as she offers those same skills to others. “I have been able to network with other carpenters through the Timebank,” she said. “They show me what they’re doing and let me tag along.” Jessica concedes that tagging along might sound unorthodox.  “It’s not a strict exchange, if you will,” she said. “It’s a softer form, of apprenticing.” 

But that kind of exchange is just fine with Timebank member Willis “Win” Allred, who helped Jessica build a bed by creating a mock-up of a joint she could replicate at each corner and suggesting a different approach to supporting the headboard. “To me, that seems like a perfectly reasonable way to use it,” he said of the Timebank. After all, he said, showing someone how to do something is a service all by itself. “To me, that’s a sharing, and that’s the way I understand what we’re doing,” he said. “Sometimes it’s just knowledge, and sometimes, it’s the actual labor.”

Being really patient

Aviva Krauthammer met Jessica at a Timebank Skills Share event where Jessica was showing some of the tools she uses as a carpenter. “People had just finished doing a lot of renovations for my house, and [so] I had seen these power tools for the past 10 months, but I had never touched one,” Aviva said.

Jessica showed her how to use a circular saw, prompting Aviva to ask for her help in designing a table for her kitchen. “I was so impressed with Jessica because this isn’t necessarily her background or her field, but she had picked it up in the past few years and was such an amazing teacher,” Aviva said. “I felt more comfortable with her showing me the ropes because I felt like she was maybe in my position at one point, and she really was sensitive to, like, me having no idea what I was doing and being really, really patient.”

Feeling tired and satisfied

Jessica said the shift in her identity was inspired by workshops at Spring Creek Homesteading in State College, Pa., where Penn State is located. “It was very different from D.C., a very sharp contrast, and [it had] people who lived very close to the land, who lived a slower pace of life and [who], in some cases, in my opinion, had a quite high quality of life because of those things, and people who worked with their hands.”

Then in 2015, she took a class at the Hammerstone School in Ithaca, N.Y., which teaches carpentry to women. “After taking that class, it was like a fire was lit in me,” she said—not just to work with her hands, but to question the assumptions that had guided her life to that point. “It was completely different from the sort of implicit messages I got growing up, [such as finding work] that would not require the use of your hands or manual labor,” she said. “It was a very big change for me to say, ‘I want to get back to my hands.’” 

Then again, she had never forgotten the hours she spent with her maternal grandfather, Eugene, as he did various carpentry projects. “He was always working on our houses, wherever we lived,” she said. “I was on hand to paint something or hand him the tools, and I was always really intrigued by what he was able to do—take pieces of something and build something that was sturdy and sound and useful. I was very much in awe of that ability, it was almost like a magical ability.”

In particular, she remembers when he built a porch on the back of the Arends’ family home, complete with screen door. “It was one of the coolest things,” she said. And so today, she is following in her grandfather’s footsteps, practicing a craft that lets her get out of her head. “My graduate training is to observe and to know something like, through the senses, and to analyze and to critique, and that can separate you from the moment,” she said “You’re no longer in the moment because you’re analyzing the moment.”

And so carpentry isn’t just carpentry, said Jessica, who became a Quaker in her 20s and attended Friends Meeting on Florida Ave. NW.  “It’s the peacefulness of being outside and using a circular saw and that sort of meditative state when you’re following the line and using a saw to cut a piece of wood …, even on a day like today,” she said on the day the D.C. area got its first real snowfall of the season, “[It’s about] having that satisfaction at the end of the day that I, like, hauled huge piles of lumber …, and it was 28 degrees, and—boom, I feel incredibly tired and satisfied.”

Jessica will be giving a sauerkraut-making demo on Sunday, April 9, at the Timebank’s Kitchen Swap at Eastern Village Cohousing. She also coordinates an Alternative Economies Book Club that includes several Time Bank members. It meets on the fourth Thursday of each month at Kaldi’s Social House in Silver Spring.

Aviva Krauthammer learns to use a circular saw from Jessica at the Silver Spring Timebank Skills Share in January 2017. 

Aviva Krauthammer learns to use a circular saw from Jessica at the Silver Spring Timebank Skills Share in January 2017. 

Thanks to SSTB member Mark Sherman for writing this story.

Exchange Story: How our Front Door is like a Cathedral

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Long down the list of “house to-do’s” was the repair of two small cracks in the stained glass on our front door.  Over the years we’d been in the house, I’d not been able to find someone to fix it.  But now we’re in the Silver Spring Timebank.  I searched the hOurWorld timebank site for “stained glass” and found a matching Member Bio!  It was Bob L. whom we’d first met when he gave us a ride to BWI. I was tickled to find that among Bob’s many talents was stained glass repair! 

Bob explained that one would normally prepare for the repair by deconstructing the wood mounts to remove the stained glass.  But he suggested we do what churches do when a small crack cannot justify the huge expense of taking out and repairing the whole window.  They glue lead on both sides of the crack, which strengthens it and prevents further damage – and also adds to the design.  The key is to match the existing lead of the panel. 

Naturally, Bob has a friend in the business, and in a couple of weeks, Bob came back with matching lead from his source.  He cut the pieces, carefully matching the angle of the cuts.  He applied adhesive, gently bent the lead to follow the lines of the cracks, and taped the pieces in place until the glue was dry.  What before was a crack that might well have gotten worse now looks like another branch of the tree pattern in our stained glass. 

I’m glad to have this item off of our to-do list, and I’m especially pleased to have discovered another rich talent in our timebank!

Jonathan B., 3/24/17

Exchange Story: A Master Baker Enlivens our Holidays

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Mary LiepoldSerbian Gibanica (2017)cheese pie in earthenware pot12” diameter x 8”

Mary Liepold
Serbian Gibanica (2017)
cheese pie in earthenware pot
12” diameter x 8”

A while back, Mary L. had prepared a nice dinner casserole for us, and she agreed to do more baking for us for the holidays.  So, for Thanksgiving, alongside other pies for her own family, she baked a wonderful apple pie for our big family dinner. 

But she surpassed herself with another baked item for a New Year’s Day party at my neighbor’s house.  Mary gave me an earthenware pot containing a still-to-be-baked Serbian Cheese Pie called Gibanica along with the recipe sheet and baking instructions.  We baked it just before the party but still had to turn it out onto a serving plate.  A fly on the wall would’ve enjoyed the hilarity of that panicked moment.  We expected it would be a mess, but the Gibanica came out of the pot clean! 

Mary’s Gibanica was the hit of the party.  Everyone raved about it.  We had put a “Serbian Cheese Pie” label next to it on the table, and only in hindsight did I think we should have given it a gallery-style label to look more like the art piece that it was: 

Jonathan B., 3/24/17