How To Make a Wooden Bunting

I originally wrote this tutorial for Crafting a Green World.

This wooden bunting can be hung indoors or outdoors.

I hung mine outdoors, where it looks so happy and colorful!

I wanted to make my outdoor space more cheerful, and this wooden bunting, while time-consuming to create, has added a LOT of cheer.

Want a cheerful permanent outdoor decoration of your own? Here’s how to make your own painted wooden bunting!

Materials

There are kind of a lot of supplies at play here, but you can likely scrounge most of them up from your stash.

• wood. The amount of wood and the size will depend on the size of your individual bunting pennants. I chose my pennant size mostly because I had plenty of scrap wood that fit those dimensions.
• primer. I would have liked a spray paint primer for its ease and efficiency, but I certainly wasn’t going to go out and buy new primer when I already own perfectly good brush-on primer. I used Zinsser Bulls Eye, which was overkill here, but totally fine.
• paint. Since you’ll be sealing it, almost any type of acrylic paint will work. I used craft acrylics, artist’s acrylics, and indoor house paint–genuinely whatever I had on hand! The sample sizes of indoor housepaint are perfect for this project.
• sealant. Again, anything that you’ve got on hand will work, as long as it works with your paint.
• cording. You can use a natural material if you’re hanging this bunting indoors, but an outdoor bunting will need something sturdier. I used nylon clothesline.
• staples. I knew I’d figure out a reason to buy a staple gun someday, and this was my reason! Excuse me while I wander off to staple EVERYTHING now…
• tools. I used pencil, paper, ruler, saw, paintbrushes, and staple gun.

Step 1: Make a template and trace the bunting pennants onto scrap wood.

I made my bunting pennant template an equilateral triangle for simplicity (but I also think that a scalloped bunting would look SO cute!). I calculated an equilateral triangle with a height matching the width of the largest number of scrap wood pieces that I had, and used that as my template. Because board width varies a bit even on boards ostensibly of the same size, I had to fudge the template with some triangles, but it’s not noticeable in the finished project.

Step 2: Cut the wooden bunting pennants.

Pretend my partner is wearing safety glasses and appropriate footwear, sigh. Also, shout out to my seven-year-old picnic table refinish, and this pic of it that has let me know that today is the perfect day to drag out the pressure washer!

You can of course also make these cuts with a handsaw, and put your fingers in slightly less danger by doing so. Regardless of the tool, though, don’t be a Matt–wear your safety glasses!

Step 3: Prime the pennants.

Hand-painting each pennant on all sides, including the edges, was annoyingly time-consuming, but I got the job done without a single trip to Menard’s, so yay!

Step 4: Paint the pennants.

You could paint these pennants however you like, with fantasy scenes or garden scenes or just polka-dots or other embellishments, but my vision was a single color for every pennant, so that’s what I did!

This part of the project is VERY time-consuming, since every pennant will likely need at least a couple of coats of paint, with drying time in between, and rotation so that all sides can get coated equally. I set this up at a table in my family room and strongly insisted to my partner and two adult children home for the summer that this was a Fun Family Project That We Should All Do Together. Nobody was as enthusiastic as I was, ahem, but everybody chipped in at least a little, and other than one small adventure in which one adult kid managed to find a single tube of oil paint of unknown provenance sneaked into the acrylics and therefore paint a pennant that will essentially never dry, all the pennants got perfectly painted!

Step 5: Seal the pennants.

It took almost a week of chipping away at the project before all the pennants were fully painted, but I managed to seal the whole lot with polyurethane sealant in one afternoon. Choose a sealant that’s rated for outdoor use.

Step 6: Staple the pennants to the cording.

Everybody loves tools, so a couple of my helpers popped back up when it was time to start stapling the pennants to cording. I wanted one long single bunting, so I measured out twelve inches of cording on one end, then stapled the pennants to the cording with a couple of inches between each pennant. 

When we ran out of pennants, I measured another twelve inches at the far end and then cut the cording.

Knot or burn the ends of the nylon cording to keep it from unraveling.

Step 7: Mount the bunting.

Use mounting supplies appropriate to your home’s exterior to mount your bunting. It looks nicest, I think, if a long bunting has several mounting points, so that it’s got lots of lovely looping drapes.

Lol at my partner wearing the exact same paint-splattered basketball shorts and beat-up Crocs on this day. He apparently has a weekend uniform!

Just between us, my brand-new painted wooden bunting is probably just a titch on the gaudy side, but eh, I personally feel like the more colors, the merrier! You could class it up for yourself, though, by limiting the color palette and/or only putting the bunting out seasonally. Which actually gives me the idea of, hear me out… how about a black and orange and purple wooden bunting for Halloween?!? You’d have the most festive front porch in town!

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I Hung a Bunting on the House Because Resale Value is For Losers

But mostly because it brings me JOY!

One of my kids low-key makes fun of my "bunting personality," because I genuinely DO just love a bunting.

I dunno, y'all. They're just so pleasant. And cheerful! And I like making them. And that's all the explanation I feel like is needed.

And that same kid does also give me bunting ideas, so it evens out the mocking.

Anyway, the peace flags that I used to have on the front porch finally rotted away (does that mean that there's peace now orrr...?), and I got the idea to replace them with something that wouldn't decompose like a metaphorical representation of our imminently pre-apocalyptic society, sigh.

And I guess also with something that wouldn't say "PEACE", ahem, but whatever. Y'all know I only hung those peace flags up in the first place because they looked like a bunting.

I didn't want to have to buy anything new for this project, but the beauty of owning too much stuff is that you always have stuff on hand to make other stuff, so my partner in crime cut down quite a lot of our scrap wood (but don't worry--we somehow still have quite a lot of scrap wood!)--

--I primed it--

--and then I snookered the entire family into painting soooo many wooden bunting flags with me:

This was randomly a bigger project than I'd thought it would be (as if every single project I start doesn't turn out to be a bigger project than I thought it would be, ahem), what with the multiple coats and drying time and washing paintbrushes, etc., and the little kid and the partner in crime both noped out near the start, leaving my older daughter/true partner in crime and I to do most of the work--

--but finally I could drag all the flags outside and seal them!

Guess who noped back in when it was time to play with the staple gun, lol. Getting to use the dangerous tools is everybody's favorite part of a project!

Yet another helper noped in when we moved the project out to the yard:

Here's where I started to worry that maybe I should have narrowed my color palette down a little bit...

But it's too late to back out now. When you're nailing something to the house, you have to commit!

And it turns out that I DO like the cacophony of colors, at least for the very specific space that is my front porch:

It's not a space that we use a ton, but somehow, now that it's so much more festive, the grill has migrated over here, too, and we do spend more time enjoying it. And see all that blank expanse of ugly brown siding?

I feel like some painted barn quilt blocks in different sizes would look so nice there. Time to see if I can sneak in just one more family project before the little kid goes back to college!

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George Washington Carver Was So Awesome WHY WAS EVERYONE SO MEAN TO HIM?!?!?!?!

George Washington Carver: A Life by Christina Vella
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

ME, worriedly, every so often: "Please don't tell anyone how much I hate Booker T. Washington so they don't think I'm racist."

ALL FAMILY MEMBERS: "Okay, but you're the most likely person to tell someone that."

And fine, it's true, so here we go:

I hate Booker T. Washington. I think he did a really terrible job running the Tuskegee Institute (he did a really great job founding it--he just did a really terrible job running it!), I think a lot of what he said and did was wrongheaded, I think he should have been open to other leaders' ideas of how best to lift up their people instead of just stubbornly following his own personal brand of black-and-white thinking, I think he got distracted by showmanship too often.

But most of all, I hate him because he was really, really, REALLY mean to George Washington Carver for literally no reason. Washington acted like his whole purpose in life was to serve his people, and then turned around and stole away probably the greatest genius of that time and hid him away and made him work like a dog without any of the resources he could have so easily provided and then when Carver created miracles anyway, Washington acted like those miracles were garbage and just continued trying to stomp Carver down.

And for some reason beyond all comprehension, or really just because that's the kind of guy he was, George Washington Carver LOVED Booker T. Washington, loved him and admired him and had so much affection for him, and in return, Washington's every action toward Carver (after, of course, he'd gone to all the trouble to woo Carver into taking that job at Tuskegee) was filled with just palpable contempt. In George Washington Carver: A Life, author Christina Vella writes that every Christmas, Carver made these beautiful hand-painted Christmas cards for all his favorite people. They were masterpieces. Washington always got one, and barely even acknowledged them. But the next year, Carver would go right ahead and paint him another beautiful masterpiece, and Washington would again be all like, "Meh." But after Washington died (yay!) and another guy took over as head of Tuskegee, Carver went to all the trouble to make that guy his very own hand-painted Christmas card, too, because he was just that nice.

And that guy was so touched that he wrote Carver a genuine multi-paged THANK-YOU NOTE FOR THE CHRISTMAS CARD. THAT'S HOW MUCH HE LOVED IT.

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Ugh, Booker T. Washington!

Honestly next I should probably read a proper biography of Booker T. Washington, because right now he exists solely in my mind as a cartoon villain.

He really was VERY mean to Carver, though.

Which I feel like is a pattern that started when Carver was a newborn! Susan and Moses Carver, the people who raised him from the time of his mother’s abduction (at least the official story is an abduction--I’d tell you what I think happened, but I feel like I have already expressed an unhealthy amount of George Washington Carver-centric conspiracy theories in my life and I think I'm already not getting invited to parties about it) to the age of nine or ten, allowed that nine- or ten-year-old to leave home and figure out his own means of sustenance and support when little George, with a knack for learning, decided that an education was what he really, really, really wanted for himself. Vella writes somewhat bemusedly that George didn’t seem to remember much of his childhood and/or would often simply tell some amusing anecdote that he’d contradict in a later interview. She attributes it to absent-mindedness, in that his focus was always elsewhere, but honestly I don’t buy it. As an adult, this dude seemed VERY focused on interpersonal relationships. He treasured his friends, and was kind to fans and acquaintances. I feel like if he couldn’t remember his childhood enough to even give a consistent count for the number of siblings he had, there was a reason for it. And if it wasn’t a memory issue but instead that he didn’t want to talk about his childhood and fiction was easier, well, there was a reason for that, too.

Thank goodness little unhoused Carver met people along the way who did help and nurture and support him, although he clearly witnessed and experienced a lot of trauma, too. And he made his own way. He cleaned houses, he took in laundry, and Vella tells a story in which as a child he talked his way into a job as a personal chef and to cover the fact that he didn’t know how to cook he got the lady of the house to demonstrate how to make every single dish so that he could, as he told her, “make it the way you like it.” And after that, he did!

After making his own way in the world, traveling to wherever there was a school he could learn in, pausing his enrollment periodically as he ran out of money, he finally got enough education to be accepted to Highland College in Kansas. He used the rest of his money to get himself there, but when he showed up, the head of the college was all like, “Oh. Yeah, we don’t actually admit Negros,” and Carver had to simply walk away, broke and with his dreams dashed AGAIN.

I hate you, too, Highland College.

Carver was, if anything, even more poor when he was finally able to attend Simpson College, an art school, and then after that, thanks to a teacher who took him under her wing, Iowa State College. But I feel like Iowa State was where he was the happiest in his entire life. He still cleaned and took in laundry, but Vella notes that his teachers and schoolmates and neighbors would make sure he at least had tons of work, because that’s the only way they could get him to take their money. In 1893, four of his paintings won entry into the Chicago World’s Fair, and Carver was going to get to go see them there. But all his clothes were garbage. So one day, some of his classmates literally kidnapped him off the street, manhandled him into a department store, forced him to try on clothes, and then bought him a beautiful new suit, completely against his will.

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And you guys. I cry every time I tell this story, because it is literally so sweet and SO insane, because Carver basically NEVER TOOK THAT SUIT OFF AGAIN IN HIS ENTIRE LIFE. I mean, like, I’m sure he had pajamas, and he spent a lot of time in a lab coat, but if he was dressed up and out and about, he was wearing that suit. That twenty-year-old suit. That thirty-year-old suit. That FORTY-YEAR-OLD SUIT. It was always clean--Carver, after all, was a laundry man!--and it always had a fresh flower in its lapel, but people started to not be able to tell what color it was supposed to be. It was probably, like, dry rotting or something at some point. And sometimes, someone would be like, “Buddy, you want to get yourself a new suit or something?” And Carver, even after he finally had some money--although he never had money like he was supposed to, because Tuskegee never paid him a decent salary, much less the salary he deserved--would just be like, “But clearly I already have a suit I am literally wearing it right now?”

So here’s the thing: Vella makes very clear that Carver was super happy at Iowa State. Some people were for sure racist towards him but a lot of people were not, he had friends, he had mentors, he was learning and he loved it, he was blowing everyone away with how smart he was and how nice and how good he was at everything, and he already had an excellent job lined up right there as soon as he graduated, because these professors did NOT want to let him out of their sight, he was so awesome.

Enter Booker T. Washington.

And okay, to be fair to Washington, the people of Alabama, Black and white but especially Black, were just absolutely beyond destitute at this time. Anything that anyone could do to help them was a very good thing. But Washington had a very black and white, VERY limited idea of what was best for Black people as a whole, and he didn’t give a fuck that it wasn’t what many Black people wanted for themselves--he was going to do for them what HE wanted to do for them, and that’s it.

And what he wanted to do for them wasn’t so much to offer a proper school education, although to be fair Tuskegee did teach literacy and numeracy, but essentially to offer more sophisticated farming and industrial education. I think it was this weird wanting to serve his people but also hating intellectualism vibe that Vella describes that made him 1) work as hard as he did to woo Carver away from his perfect Iowa State prospects, but also 2) shit on everything Carver tried to do and act contemptuous of all his accomplishments and thwart all his efforts because Carver was clearly very intellectually gifted and treasured intellect, and that shone through as much as his kindness did.

So Washington refused to fund Carver’s teaching lab, causing Carver to resort to garbage picking and DIY to stock it. Carver scored a very prestigious federal grant to host an experiment station at the school, and Washington refused to assign him a consistent staff to work it. When Carver succeeded with the station anyway and published useful educational brochures, Washington refused to have them printed. It got so bad that when Washington learned that Carver had been teaching--for free! in his free time!--an extremely popular Bible study class for the past three years, he immediately shut it down. Tell me one reason why he’d do that that’s not from simple spite!

Tuskegee could have furnished his lab if they'd wanted to.

Also, I’m very open to the possibility that the author is biased against Booker T. Washington and has simply passed it onto me. Like I said, I need to read a proper bio about him!

But you know what? Carver took Washington’s contempt and Tuskegee’s garbage and with them, he performed wonders. He genuinely saved Alabama, and the South as a whole, with his research and outreach. Enslavers had used their access to free labor to monoculture cotton to such an extent that the land was completely devoid of nutrients, and so everyone who was still trying to live off the land had resorted to simply growing more and more of that same monoculture just to chase any kind of profit. People were malnourished because they’d converted their kitchen gardens to cotton. Same with their livestock yards. Part of Carver’s extensive research and outreach was finding nutritious, cheap crops and livestock that fed people, turned a profit, and also healed the land. Sweet potatoes. Hogs. PEANUTS!!! People were also longing for more elevated lifestyles but weren’t sure what that would consist of, so were spending their precious money on stupid stuff like fancy clocks and organs that represented culture to them (tangent, but I thought this detail was VERY interesting, because way north in De Smet, South Dakota, the Ingalls family was also spending their precious money on a stupid organ!). So Carver researched methods of making beautiful paints cheaply from the local soils, then taught everyone how to paint their homes and furnishings so they could have pretty things around them without wasting their money.

Another tangent: all throughout the book, Vella just keeps on referring to Carver’s “woman’s voice.” She genuinely goes out of her way to bring this up ALL THE TIME. Carver meets someone famous--they must be surprised to hear his woman’s voice! Carver gives a lecture--people probably thought it was strange hearing a woman’s voice! At one point, I swear she is absolutely giddy because Carver met a woman whom she says had an unusually deep voice, and she’s genuinely all, “OMG I BET IT SOUNDED SO WEIRD! BECAUSE HE SOUNDED LIKE A WOMAN AND SHE SOUNDED LIKE A MAN! AND WHEN THEY TALKED TO EACH OTHER IT WAS LIKE THE OTHER PERSON’S VOICE SHOULD BE COMING OUT OF EACH OF THEIR MOUTHS! HAHAHAHAHA!!!”

So anyway, I kept reading her taking these shots at Carver’s voice and being all, “Dude! Why is she obsessed with saying he sounds like a woman?” So I got on YouTube to see if there are any videos of Carver speaking.

There are. And fine, he sounds like a woman. Just… Vella acts weirdly excited about it, okay?

Anyway, *I* was very excited in the book when Booker T. Washington died, even though it caused Carver to go into genuine mourning for months and also donate half a year’s worth of his pitiful salary to a memorial for that asshole. I’m just so mad at how much of his life he gave up for that man.

There’s another whole weird part of the biography concerning how Carver apparently also gave up another huge chunk of his life to massaging people with peanut oil, because it got published in the newspapers as a miracle cure, causing people to show up from everywhere all the time asking him to, and he was too nice to say no. It’s super weird, though.

Another weird part: although everyone online seems to think that Carver was queer because he was life partners with the lab assistant he had late in his career, Austin W. Curtis, Jr., Vella does not think that this was true at all. Honestly, she low-key makes Curtis out to be a villain who made secret deals behind Carver’s back to profit off of their professional partnership and their friendship. Instead, she puts forth the VERY convincing case that Carver was queer because he was deeply in love with a much younger man whom he met through church stuff. He wrote him obsessive letters for years, letters in which you can literally feel the agonized longing, translated into Jesus-speak. This besottedness went mostly unreciprocated, poor dude. Honestly, I think Carver was probably aroace. His letters of religious fervor to that dude did sound pretty sexy, but I dunno, religion can be weird like that.

Eventually, Henry Ford befriended Carver and built him the fanciest of fancy labs. But you guys, you might as well go ahead and start crying with me again, because by then, Carver was too frail to get much use out of it. He just always worked so hard, and I feel like he never got exactly what he deserved out of life. I guess he’d be proud of his beautiful George Washington Carver Museum at Tuskegee, although I’m low-key mad about it, but his other memorial is literally at his enslavers’ house sooo…

So… I dunno, you guys. All I know about George Washington Carver I learned from his national park site and this biography and some really sketchy online content that I do not believe. People are such weirdos. So, did Vella do me dirty? Is Booker T. Washington actually awesome and now I hate him for no reason? Was Curtis really Carver’s lover and Vella simply won’t say?

Is it super weird that she kept saying he had a woman’s voice? I mean sure, it’s high-pitched--okay, it’s remarkably high-pitched--but she’s being weird about it, right?

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In Which I Go On A Pilgrimage To George Washington Carver's Hometown

And I am really, really, really super chill about it!

Lol, you KNOW that's not true, if only because I have never ever been chill about a single thing in my entire life ever. Much less that it is objectively impossible to be chill about George Washington Carver, THE MOST PROFOUND GENIUS OF OUR TIME, WHO SPENT LITERALLY HIS ENTIRE LIFE BEING THWARTED AND DIMINISHED AND STIFLED, WHO WAS NEVER ALLOWED TO REACH HIS FULL POTENTIAL AND YET STILL CREATED WONDROUS THINGS, WHO LIVED SOLELY TO SERVE HIS PEOPLE AND LIFT THEM UP AND DID SO UNDER IMPOSSIBLE CONDITIONS THAT WOULD HAVE CRUSHED ANY OTHER PERSON, WHO LOVED HANDICRAFTS AS MUCH AS I DO BUT WAS QUITE A LOT BETTER AT THEM THAN I AM, AND WHO. WAS. QUEER!!!

Anyway, this warning sign on the front door of the visitor center of the George Washington Carver National Monument amused me:

I hadn't ever thought about it, but I guess you cannot conduct place-based, experiential learning at the monument for the guy made famous by peanuts if you've got a peanut allergy!

Bonus point: this was my fourth national park site that I visited over Juneteenth weekend (which was on a Friday this year), and yet this was the only Juneteenth programming that I encountered. And it was really good!

As part of the program, the park ranger gave a rundown of every national park site that honors a Black person or has an emphasis on the Black experience. It was very helpful!

In other news... Okay, I'm just going to come right out and tell you right away that I have mixed feelings about George Washington Carver's national park site being located at his birthplace. 

On the one hand, I do think that the site does all it can, considering its location, to carefully classify the relationship between George and his older brother, Jim, and their former slaveowners with whom they lived until George left them at about the age of 9 or 10. George himself, while writing a short biographical sketch in his old age, referred to them as "Mr. and Mrs. Carver," said that they were "very kind" to him, and thanked them for his "home training." In signage, the site mainly refers to them as the children's "guardians," which is objectively correct. The children were allowed to live in the former slaveowner's cabin with them, there are no accusations or even oblique suggestions in any primary source material that I can find that the children were ever mistreated, and although they were required to work, there also don't seem to be any accusations or suggestions that the children were worked like servants, and not like boys of that time period whose labor was assumed and required. 

However, I feel like placing George Washington Carver's memorial on the site of these former slaveowners' land, where he lived for only a decade at most but where they lived for most of their lives, centers them shamefully in a story that they have no business being more than a couple of paragraphs in. Sure, his childhood home is where he learned to love nature and handicrafts and first discovered his knack for music and art and learning, but that is nothing to the credit of these former slaveowners. They did not birth him. They did not nurture him as parents would. They trafficked and enslaved his mother, then enslaved her children. Moses Carver gave George his mother's spinning wheel and her bill of sale, but he did not give him her wages or any percentage of whatever profit her labor had allowed him. They didn't pay for his education or help him obtain it. George spent the latter half of his childhood unhoused in search of that education, paying for it himself, getting occasional help from total strangers but none from these former slaveowners.

George himself didn't center these people or seem to hold them close emotionally. This is a man who wrote weekly letters for his entire life to people he'd met once (and sometimes never!), who gave handmade Christmas cards and answered every letter he ever received, who wasted his affection on countless people who did not deserve it, but who did not write his former slaveowners, nor did he visit them more than a couple of times. He even lost track of Moses entirely later in the man's life. If he had an emotional attachment to Moses' farm, it must have been a complicated one, perhaps more centered on his brother and the mother he couldn't remember and the place itself than the people who started his life as his enslavers.

But having George's national monument on this land implicitly centers Moses and Susan Carver. It was THEIR land! The visitor center looks out into what was once their cropland that George's mother, Mary, and then George and Jim after her, were required to work for free:

I guess we're being super neutral in this signage, but George didn't have "to build his own lab equipment from scratch, working with what others saw as trash" because Tuskegee Institute itself was poor, which is what I think the signage implies; he did that because Booker T. Washington himself, the head of Tuskegee Institute, literally would not give him the money to buy a single thing. The Institute had the money to equip his lab--they just wouldn't do it.

The hiking trail passes, and you can walk around in, their house that was built after George left them (again, at 9 or 10 years old!) and so he never even lived in it:

The trail also passes the cemetery where several Carvers are buried with their headstones. There are likely at least two of George's siblings also in that cemetery, but their graves are unmarked and can't be pinpointed. Jim, George, and Mary are not buried here:

I don't like it.

Here's as good a place as any to also add my own personal conspiracy theory that I am VERY suspicious of how a childless couple who were not slaveowners made one, and only one ever, purchase of an enslaved person, and that one enslaved person that this childless couple thought it was important enough to purchase was a thirteen-year-old girl. That thirteen-year-old girl went on, while still a child, to have two children who lived past infancy, and each child had a different person named as their father, and each time, the person named as their father was someone who happened to have already died. 

Since George and Jim, as far as we know, were as childless as Moses and Susan, I guess there's no way to figure it out now, but again: I DO NOT LIKE IT.

Okay, that's all I'm going to say about these people. Also, I am trying to limit how crazy I sound on a daily basis, and this has definitely put me beyond my per day limit for today.

Instead, please look at the footprint of the cabin where George Washington Carver was born, and where he lived with his mother for a very, very short amount of time:

George Washington Carver had no memories of his mother, and never saw her again or knew what happened to her (nor do we!), but as an adult he kept her spinning wheel with him in his home, where friends said it was treasured.

Okay, just let me make this one last comparison: holding onto and treasuring a keepsake from a parent you never even knew vs. never visiting and even completely losing track of the person who supposedly raised you for the first ten years of your life. Moses and Susan Carver did not do right by those children.

Here's a sketch George made of the cabin in which he was born:

The museum at the visitor center states that this sketch was made "later in life," but interestingly, I recently read a biography that claimed the sketch must have been made when he was a child, since it's a bit rough and George quickly grew later in childhood to become an incredible artist. That biography also discussed how ill he was for several years at the end of his life, however, including how he lost strength and mobility in his limbs, so I reckon that the visitor center is probably correct. Even later in life he was still a wonderful artist who wielded his medium, and his tools, as well as he was physically able to wield them.

The national monument has turned much of its land into a peaceful, beautiful native meadow, and I think this, more than anything else on the site other than his mother's spinning wheel, is the perfect memorial to George Washington Carver:

I also loved walking through the woods he explored and played in as a child:

There's a sweet statue of a young George in a clearing in the woods, although by all accounts, including his own, he was very much a scrawny, sickly little fellow and so likely did not very much resemble this healthy, hale child. We'll just say it's a statue of young George's spirit of determination, then:



Although one day I want to go to the George Washington Carver Museum at the Tuskegee Institute National Historic Site, there are numerous examples of George's handicrafts and work projects here, as well:

He had a huge collection of specimens that he could have used for pedagogy, but Booker T. Washington never gave his department the space to display them, and the storage allocated for them was vulnerable to the elements and pests, so much of it was ruined.

Labels and annotations in his own hand!

I walked through a lab clearly set up so that the museum could conduct educational programming, and found what would probably have been George Washington Carver's favorite thing here:

He still gets to teach.

In other news, next year I am 100% figuring out how to grow my own peanut plant in the garden. Peanuts are SUPER nutritious, did you know? And super versatile--you can do SO many things with them, like peanut milk!

You should also keep pigs. They're very gentle, eat lots of scraps, and if you can bring yourself to have them slaughtered they're pound-for-pound very much worth the investment in their upkeep.

P.S. Want to follow along with my craft projects, books I'm reading, road trips to weird old cemeteries, looming mid-life crisis, and other various adventures on the daily? Find me on my Craft Knife Facebook page!