Wai-Iti Ridge

Kia ora! Just a wee re-introduction

I'm just another solarpunk in Aotearoa looking for other like-minded friends, inspiration, and advice on other ways I can green up my life. I love sewing, baking, making, gardening, and animals.

I live in an off-grid tiny home I built with my partner in 2016 out of wood and second-hand windows/doors/appliances. We run off solar power, rain water, a composting toilet, and try to repair, mend, make, borrow, and buy 2nd hand or local. Our meat is all hunted, which here in Aotearoa is a huge help for our environment as our only native mammals are seals and bats. Everything else is a pest. We also grow a lot of our own fruit and veggies, but the garden is still a work in progress. This year, i have a new wing of the veggie garden built, but I still have so much work to do around the herb and fairy garden.

I'm looking at irrigating the garden and automating the process. I saw something about https://www.home-assistant.io/ online but would love any advice you might have. I'd like to automate and chart my watering as well as integrate moisture monitors and a weather monitoring system.

I have an electric bike and an old 1996 honda crv. I'd like to switch to an electric vehicle, something like a Pickman 4x4 or another small farm vehicle, as I only need to get to the village bus stop, neighbouring farms, and the occasional trip into town via back roads.

Clothes are me-made with 2nd hand materials, mostly from the dump shop. I've helped start a collection point for alternative recycling like bottle lids and tetrapaks, a library of things, and a community workshop. We are working towards a bike repair hub and time bank but it might be a couple years before they are operational.

I am helping out with a community disaster preparedness expo and needed something that said "high-vis" "work safe" and "prepared". I found some vests at the dump and made this wee romper. I still have some scraps so thinking a big hair bow and maybe some work safe outfits for my daughters dollies.

Here's some instructions if you also want to make some 😊

I still need to draw up a sized petal template but I've also made a youtube video (my first one, it's horrible 😂) if you are more of a visual learner.

1. Cut 1 brown corduroy circle 1 wool batting circle and 2 green 2/3 circles (for the back)

2. Cut 12 pairs of petals (24 pieces total)

3. Sew petal pieces right sides together 1cm away from edges. Turn right sides out and top stitch along the edge. Stitch centre petal seam. Repeat for all petals

4. Quilt your brown centre to the wool. I made lines about 1.5cm apart making a grid.

5 Pin 6 of your petals centre first evenly spaced around the edge. Pin the last 6 over the gaps. Sew 1 cm from the edge

6 Roll hem the straight edge of the 2/3 circle pieces (a rol hem to folding and then folding again)

7 make 3 button holes evenly spaced on one back piece

8 secure the pieces to eachother both having right sides up, creating a pocket

9 fold on your petals and pin your back piece right sides together to your flower front. Sew 1.5cm around the edge and turn out through the pocket.

10 stuff your pillow then add buttons to fit the holes you made earlier. I do the buttons last to make sure they fit nicely when fully puffed.

there is something so peaceful about summer rain 🌱

Most are still babies and won't fruit for a couple years:

Mulberry

Various apples

Dwarf nectarine

Dwarf peach

Regular peach

Pomegranate

Just one Inga bean

Just one Sapote

Orange

Kumquat

Lemon

Lime

Finger lime

Avocado

Also have some nut trees like walnut, hazelnut, macadamia nut

My wish list for the 2025 winter planting season

Cherry trees

Plums

Mandarins

Pears

An Arrietty Birthday Party

The wee Gremlin is turning 5 and has requested an Arrietty themed party. As my friends know, I love to go all out for parties with costumes, DIY decor, and themed foods. I've already been gathering my supplies over the year for:

An Arrietty dress for the birthday child

Giant clothes pegs for hair clips

Wooden dowels and foam balls for pin swords for each guest

Fabric for belt pin sword holders for each guest

A tea cup and saucer for each guest

Fabric for giant flowers

Cardboard for a giant bug pinata for the kids to hit with their swords

Over the next week I have to smash it all out and make the the food.

Not sure how themed the food is but I'm going with classic tea sandwiches, fairy bread, zucchini loaf, and a watermelon star shaped fruit jelly cake. It is a tea party theme so we'll have jugs with fruity and herbal tea blends and maybe some blue pea flower fizzy water and cordial for some colour changing action!

Like last year, i want to do a scavenger hunt where i hide the treasures (this year it will be pin swords, belts, and their tea cups) i think I'll make a giant spool of thread to put the pin swords in and a sugar cub box out of cardboard for the tea cups. Maybe hibe an extra bug pinata with the belts in it by the spool of thead? Maybe that's the only pinata? But i also kind of want one filled with black pompom pipe cleaners and pastel star bead packets so each kid can make a sootsprite bracelet?

Today i low key poisoned myself with Phenol trying to strip the marine grade two pot poly paint my partner put on our doors. I was so careful applying and removing but as I was moving on to sanding, a missed glob fell on my knee. Did the proper thing and removed then washed under running water and checked the bottle for instructions... which said contact poison control immediately who told me to go to the ER, which was full. I got mild chemical burns, nausea, cold sweats, dizziness, and a racing heart. Sent home because the hospital is full and there is no antidote anyway 🥰

For as many follwers as I have, I hardly get DMs. But when I do, they are almost always a scammer. Like 99.9999%. My favourite part is them asking me to cash cheques when I don't think I've seen one in 10 years. It's not even an option at my bank 😂

Btws that number is the New Zealand Serious Fraud Office

The saga continues

I bought this for $5 from an opshop to have a physical representation of what I want to be in life.

I used to take pictures of every loaf i baked. I feel like I've become so jaded about having fresh baked bread. I'm so lucky to have the time and ability to bake bread and I don't want to ever forget that. I want to celebrate all the littlest things that make my life feel magical.

Its really strange having a following on social media. I've made so many friends and gotten opportunities I wouldn't have without it. Overall I think I've found a little slice of heaven online. Its 90% kindness in my corner and the other 10% is inevitable. I think the hardest part has been seeing the numbers. It's ingrained in us to view these numbers as a currency. More = better, less = worse. They aren't really numbers though, they are (mostly🤖) people.

I would never expect the attention of hundreds of thousands of individuals. I wouldn't even expect a room full of a dozen to all pay attention to me so why does it feel like rejection when the numbers drop? I know it's just people's tastes changing, people growing, or expeting something different. Why does it feel like someone is saying "I don't like you"? Why does it feel like something in my life is actively leaving me when I don't even know the username, let alone the person, leaving? I hate that I have to see the stupid numbers when I go to my profile to find a video in my saved folder. I don't want to know "how many people left me" last night. There is always this voice in my head that it means I've done something wrong, that I've harmed someone to make them leave but I will meticulously crawl through my videos to see what could have been misinterpreted or left without explanation and I can't find anything that stands out. I start to wonder if maybe I'm just too stupid to see it. Too ignorant. Too cold hearted. If maybe I'm not meeting the expectations of kindness I set for myself. Maybe I'm not funny, just strange. Maybe it makes people feel uncomfortable. I should dial it back. I should think about dialing back personality to make sure I'm more palatable... but if people don't see the real me, who would they be following?

So I do it. I put myself out there. I make the silly videos with my authentic dopey self on display. I put together a little video, a slice of my day, like a diary. I love capturing all the bits. The lighting, the flowers, the bees and trees. The way my ducks waddle after me or the food I made. Marbles sleeping and her paws twitching. I love film and photography as an art form. Finding the angles and lighting to capture the feelings the moment is giving me in a way I can share with others. Part of it is so my daughter will have a way of knowing me and how I saw the world when I'm gone. I would give almost anything to have something like that from my own mother. To see how she saw the world and maybe have some clues for the unanswered questions she left me with. Outside of art and memories, film is just fun. I love finding music that's inspiring and seeing how each sound can change the entire energy of a clip. Like lining up words for laughs or tears. I would do it all again and again even if no one was watching. It's like a game where I'm trying to find the story in my day and pull out just 1 second from each moment to tell it in a way people who weren't there might enjoy watching with no context. Sometimes i win and people love it! Sometimes I think I've got something really great but no one sees it so I don't get to know whether it was watch worthy or just average. Sometimes people do see them and just dont like them, which I personally find better than not knowing.

Social media is a fickle beast. You have algorithms crawling captions for trending words - Heartfelt messages that use descriptive language beyond buzzwords wont do. You have filters looking at the videos themselves for clips that match what it's looking to push - Was every shot photo perfect? Was the lighting good enough for the filters to pick out my face or cute animals? The sound suits the video perfectly - but is it trending? What's the like to view ratio, what about comments and is that enough or are they weighing saves or shares more? Did I leave a comment somewhere or interact with a post that was too political? Am i off the fyp because of it?

Sowing seeds and tending the hydrangea cuttings. Going to have so many extra seeldings to swap with friends and plant out in the playcentre garden while I continue my war with the local police officer to establish a community garden.