My bicycle obsessions tell a different story. The bikes that I own and the bikes that I covet prove me to be quite the opposite of a minimalist. I add features. My “fast bike” has the couplers and takes fenders and a rack. Even my fantasy track bike has two water bottle cages. And disc brakes. And brass fenders. And a chaingaurd. Oh! And the ability to convert it to an internally geared bike if I want. See what I mean?

My latest bike obsession has forced me to come face-to-face with my miminalist/maximalist conflict. I want an long tail. Specifically, I want to transform my Two Bite Curry city bike into the Free Ranger with the Xtracycle’s Free Radical conversion kit. If you ask me why, I will tell say:

• 15 pounds of dog food and a bale of hay
• Bike camping
• Carrying your new Sweetpea to the final fitting
• Putting my mom on the back for a picnic at Laurelhurst Park

My inner minimalist asks me if I haven’t been doing just fine with my current basket and panniers. It reminds me that I already have a trailer. My inner minimalist asks me if more “stuff” is the answer.

But here’s the catch. I don’t suppose it’s a material problem I am looking to solve. I am willing to admit that the physical things I want perhaps speak more directly to the intangible things that I want.
I want to feel that any adventure is possible.

• I want to imagine that I am one good idea away from a bike trip to the coast.
• I want to broadcast generosity of spirit at every frequency. “Let me carry that for you!” “ Can I give you a lift?”
• I want to get pulled over for reckless optimism. With my mom riding shotgun.

I don’t know yet if and when I will be getting the long tail. But I am inclined to believe that some of the best stuff you’d want to carry with you down the road doesn’t actually weigh you down at all.

This bike began as a big idea and a spot in line.

The big idea was that you could build a bike almost entirely in Portland from design to finished product, and that the only thing standing in the way of that was a little help from friends. So a year before last year’s Alice awards, we put a spot in line for a frame and fork, and donated it to the BTA.

Then we reached out to Michael Sylvester of Bicycle Fitting Services for the fit, Chris King for the wheels, BB, and headset, and asked River City to bring it home. This is the finished product. It took a little while to completely come together, but it showed how a simple idea can turn into something beautiful.

I have a favorite garden in Kyoto. It wasn’t one of those totally immaculate and famous gardens. It was part of a larger park up on a hillside. But whether Japanese gardens are formal or not, they are meant to be seen by walking through them, allowing the path shifting your perspective, revealing and obscuring views. Stone steps lead your eyes as much as your feet. Meandering about this particular garden, I came to a point where two paths converged. They met up and led me another ten feet to a dead end. I found myself stopped short at a scraggly lumpy little azalea plant.

I found this both funny and sweet. The language of the garden is subtle, full of commas and parenthesis, but here was an azalea exclamation point. “Look at me! Aren’t I fantastic?”

I’ve got paths on my mind as I plan my garden for spring. We’ve lived here not a year yet, and our yard is already marked by use and habit, and the course of everyday life. Paths have been worn into the lawn, now mud. I see the path from the side gate to the shop, well worn. I see the patio to the chicken coop, well worn. I see the turn around spot that the dog has made on her wild ricochets across the yard and back.

These paths tell a story, and it is a factual account. I can respect that. I may even lay down a stone path to formalize them. But I also find myself with an urge to lay down some shiny mosaic stepping stones on the way to my rhubarb plant, way at the back of the yard. It is growing little by little while I go about my business. Sweet, tart, and sturdy. I should travel that path often and give my rhubarb a few kind words. At some point it will be the path to pie.

The best part about making things by hand is that you get to carefully consider how you want to approach your materials, your tools, and your process. You can add your intelligence and your insight along the way to produce an object that simply couldn’t exist without your hand in the making. Or as Steve Jobs put it you can try “to expose yourself to the best things humans have done and then bring those things into what you are doing.“

The flip side is that you can also add your inexperience and your miscalculations and end up with a mistake. When the hand and the brain are connected in the making of things, it can be a blessing or a curse.

I picked up the fork that I had just built the day before. It was my first unicrown fork. I cleaned it up and admired it from all angles. It looked good! And then I discovered that it was shorter than I had designed it to be. I soon saw my error, and realized what I need to do differently. But there is no getting around it, the fork I was so proud of turned out to be a dud.

The generous view is that making mistakes is part of the learning process. And it is commonly said that the best craftspeople are the ones who are continually learning. These twin platitudes are a shallow consolation when I need to both learn and produce on a tight timeline. I don’t have a lot of time to be messing around building lovely but too-short forks.

The less generous, brutally pragmatic view is that I could have sourced a fork from a supplier that has nearly identical specifications, from the rake, to the span, to every last braze-on. It would have been less expensive to buy that complete fork than to pay for my materials and paint costs, let alone my time. Let alone twice. But I wanted to build it. I wanted to build it because I had the opportunity to learn something new. I also was convinced I could build a fork that was more beautiful than the one I could buy, despite having never done so.

So, I will go out into the shop early tomorrow morning and buckle down until I have my second ever unicrown fork. What will be visible in the finished product? Refinement or beauty? Maybe, maybe not. But it will be the fork that simply wouldn’t exist if I hadn’t built the first one. That will be good enough.

This is what it looks like when we plan our future.

Important things for you to know:

• S’mittens will be back in limited and colorful numbers.
• We will also have some of Natalie’s block prints, including one brand new (and quite large) addition.

It’s the holidays people.  Let’s do this thing.

One Percent For the Planet | Sweetpea Bicycles from felt soul media on Vimeo.

The folks over at 1% For the Planet are doing short member profiles with some help from the gang at Felt Soul Media (who incidentally did the awesome film Red Gold).  We are stoked that they chose to profile us, as well as give Greta her internet video debut.  They do a great job of capturing why we 1% members, but we also feel pretty lucky to share a little space on the internet with our business hero Yvon Chouinard.

When we joined, there wasn’t even a cycling category.  Today, in addition to the 52 participating Oregon companies, there are also a bunch of great local cycling companies who are also 1% members.  (See: Team Estrogen and Tsunehiro Cycles)

It’s an ambitious goal. And today we’re going to take it one step further.

Like all custom builders out there, we have been students of the craft honing the design and fabrication of the bikes that we build. This takes hours of work, effort, and imagination. But we have also spent years studying the language of the body on the bike. Any builder can tell you that fabrication skills take years to develop. And any bike fitter can tell you that you need to do hundreds of bikes fits to understand the intricacies of the body on a bike. It is kind of like learning how to be a machinist and physical therapist at the same time.

And it’s something we have been doing this for the last four years.

Today we are announcing the Lust line: a limited production run of bikes that incorporate all that we understand about the relationship between women’s bodies and their bikes.

(Prototype)

A project more than a year in development, the Lust line is going to start with the release of our most requested bike: The Little Black Dress This design is informed and inspired by the ideal riding positions of real women and offers an elegant alternative to the standard bike shop fare. It won’t work for everyone, but it will work for a lot of women.

The best part: these bikes will be less expensive than our custom options and they will be delivered in just a few months.

LEARN MORE about the design process and the LUST line here.

When I was 18 or so, I had my mind blown by reading an article by Yvon Chouinard called The Next 100 Years, where he talked about building Patagonia to survive the next century and discussed the notion of buying stuff that lasts even if it cost more up front. Reading it I was confronted with the idea of a company that meant something, as well as the concept of real quality. I never bought stuff the same way again. Whenever I was faced with the prospect of buying one thing versus another, I would always advise myself to “buy it once” meaning – don’t spend money on something you are going to throw away or won’t last.

Many years later, I got good stuff that I still I don’t need.

The ‘buy it once’ mantra was good for deciding to add something, but didn’t help when it came to getting rid of things. So when I came across that sentence, “surround yourself with beautiful, excellent things and get rid of all else” I knew I might be onto a way of deftly dealing with the objects that come into my life. I was introduced to it on BoingBoing and then again on the Nau blog, but it came from something called the Last Viridian Note.  A couple of key passages:

“What is “sustainability?” Sustainable practices navigate successfully through time and space, while others crack up and vanish. So basically, the sustainable is about time — time and space. You need to re-think your relationship to material possessions in terms of things that occupy your time. The things that are physically closest to you. Time and space.

It’s not bad to own fine things that you like. What you need are things that you GENUINELY like. Things that you cherish, that enhance your existence in the world. The rest is dross.

The items that you use incessantly, the items you employ every day, the normal, boring goods that don’t seem luxurious or romantic: these are the critical ones. They are truly central. The everyday object is the monarch of all objects. It’s in your time most, it’s in your space most. It is “where it is at,” and it is “what is going on.”

It takes a while to get this through your head, because it’s the opposite of the legendry of shopping. However: the things that you use every day should be the best-designed things you can get. For instance, you cannot possibly spend too much money on a bed — (assuming you have a regular bed, which in point of fact I do not). You’re spending a third of your lifetime in a bed. Your bed might be sagging, ugly, groaning and infested with dust mites, because you are used to that situation and cannot see it. That calamity might escape your conscious notice. See it. Replace it.”

I think it was the Dalai Lama who said, “everything must go.” It is easier said than done. Holding on is something we do kind of naturally. But at least now I have the framework for subtraction and a case for keeping those beautiful things.

If you are interested in a Sweetpea, but think that waiting a year and a half for a bike is absurd, we encourage you to send us a note by clicking here. We got something cookin’ that you might be interested in.