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My Chinese folding scissors come in handy for snipping
off the more resistant S-weeds - and some, like the Giant
Hogweed should not be touched with bare hands, so the plastic
bags I carry with me when Weed Walking (the kind I buy my fruit
and vegetables in) will sometimes serve as makeshift gloves, although
their main purpose is as containers. I also use a few food storage
containers for bringing home my findings without too much wilting.
Simple urban technology!!
The tools for processing
the S-weeds into a shape for webcrafting will count as fancier
stuff - although it's still no supercomputer equipment. Of course
there can BE no webcraft without a lot of computer gear, all the
way between me and you. And in one sense it was my acquisition
of a scanner - an Epson Perfection
610 - that served as a primary generator of the S-weed webcrafting.
The WALKS may be a different matter: I needed to get out, away
from keyboard and screen. The S-weed paradox is how each walk
outdoors brings many more hours of work at the computer.
Anyway, the scanner brought things together.
My old - lifelong - interest for wildflowers and learning to recognize
them. My old background - lying fallow - in textile crafts: I
see pattern designs in every tangled meadow, and unequalled elegance
in the curves of plant detail. And, not least, the way computer
technologies have grown into my life in the past decades. The
thing with a flatbed scanner is how weeds are just the right size
to fit on the scanner bed, available for the pleasures of electronic
crafting of something true and beautiful. The digital
camera is mostly an afterthought, nice for documentation on
the spot.
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