Last week I was asked to speak to an industrial design class at the art institute of Portland about framebuilding and bike design. The class is participating in the Oregon Manifest Builder’s Challenge, and I think they have one of the most exciting challenges of all. That is, they are starting as complete beginners to bike construction. And you can only be brand spankin’ new once.

I found myself wanting to impart equal parts pep talk, myth-busting, and practical advice.  Among these tidbits were:

• Keep your hands in check with your brain. Draw your construction drawings by hand, at scale. This keeps the thinking in check with the making, and helps you catch errors before they are rendered permanent in steel.
• Know where your bottom bracket is at all times.
• Bike building is a totally learnable craft – you don’t need a blessing or a blood transfusion of some ancient cranky framebuilder in order to get ‘er done.

Sometimes when you are talking about your work, a belief that you have held close but never articulated tumbles out of your mouth in word form for the first time. When the conversation turned to jigs and fixtures, I got up on a bit of a soapbox:

When your tools tell you that “it can’t be done” you need to dismantle them, use them in a new way, or throw them away and invent new ones.

Tools embody wisdom and working methods. They are useful guides for physical problem solving, but they can sometimes get downright didactic once you’ve got them in your head and in your hands. Whether it is the bike that is too small, too large, too awesome to fit in your standard frame jig or whether it is the tubing bender you need to hack in order to realize the beautiful curve in your mind, the better tool is the one you set aside when it gets in your way.

This class can learn the craft of frame building.
They can build a rad little bike in the five weeks they have left.

But their real challenge is to build something that has never been built before. From what I’ve seen they have all of the creativity and design thinking they need. But whether you are brand new or have been at it for years, one of the most important tools you can deploy is fearlessness.

“Long ago you kissed the names of the nine Muses goodbye
and watched the quadratic equation pack its bag,
and even now as you memorize the order of the planets,

something else is slipping away, a state flower perhaps,
the address of an uncle, the capital of Paraguay.”

Have you ever heard that wonderful factoid about how we can hold up to seven chunks of info, plus or minus two, in our short term memory at a time? Well I invite you to cast aside the order of the planets and commit something of greater practical importance to your memory.

The Moosewood Fudge Brownie recipe. 6 ingrdients, 6 steps, one bowl. Because if you keep some basic supplies on hand and have this recipe committed to memory, you can go from zero to brownies in 25 minutes.

Impulse brownie making is power. This is the itch and the scratch in one 9″ sqaure baking pan. So grease it and let’s begin.

Moosewood Fudge Brownies (adapted)
½ cup butter
2 large eggs
1 cup lightly packed brown sugar
½ tsp pure vanilla extract
¼ cup cocoa powder (Moosewood calls for 3 squares of unsweetened chocolate to be melted with butter)
½ cup flour

Preheat oven to 350.
1. Butter your 8” or 9” square baking pan.
2. Melt you’re your butter.
3. While it is melting, beat eggs in a medium sized bowl.
4. Add the brown sugar, melted butter and vanilla.
5. Stir in the cocoa powder and flour until smooth.
6. Pour into your pan and bake for 20 minutes, or until done but still fudgey.

These brownies are straight-forward yum. Perhaps you have seen a brownie recipe that is more exotic or special, but this one is like husbands and pets – when you claim it as your own, you believe there is nothing finer on god’s green earth. At least as far as you can recall.

A few months ago, I came across the sentence: “Surround yourself with beautiful, excellent things and get rid of all else.”  And whoa, has it stayed with me.

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.

On a rainy fall day many years ago, I was a bike messenger delivering a super rush to the courthouse. The various parties involved in the scene that ensued will tell you different stories.  This is mine:

My bike shoes always set off the metal detector, and I got in the habit of taking them off and running them through the machine in order to save time and conversation. On this particular day, that metal detector was crammed with umbrellas and coats and the line was full of soggy citizens fumbling with keys and belts. I cleared security in my pink striped socks. I had a filing for the circuit court and two minutes to get it there. “There” was the second floor, so close, yet so far. My shoes were making a slow journey through security. I assessed my options: wait for the shoes and possibly miss the deadline, or deliver the package and let the circuit court enjoy my pink striped socks.  

I left the shoes and went for it.

Bounding up the stairs in my socks, I heard a voice shout out “WAIT!” It was the security guard holding up my soggy bike shoes. I waved the file urgently, the guard nodded his assent and I was off again. I made it no further than the marble landing before I was tackled by two armed guards. They had only heard “WAIT!” and saw me continue.  

As the sheriff issued my 90 day suspension from the courthouse and snapped my picture for their files, the guard with my shoes came to my defense and urged me to clear this up with an appeal to the judge.  I was then cleard to drop off my filing upstairs.

A week later the judge ruled. The official story from the guards was that I was swearing and belligerent, so the suspension held. What had they seen in me? A zealous messenger in pink striped socks, or something a bit darker? I like to think that in a Polaroid buried deep in Multnomah County records, my eyes reveal the truth to the camera.

All I can say is that I eat bacon, and I am bigger than I look.

Quietly, like a new years eve celebration that goes to bed at 9:30, we celebrated our one year anniversary of being car free.

There was less fuss to going car free than I would have anticipated – the lease was up, so I put the bike in the back, went to the dealership, gave them their car back, and rode home. That was pretty much it. Not a lot of planning. A little gearing up in terms of a good rain jacket and gloves. We did go big on the fenders now that we didn’t have car or gas payments.

A couple of days into it, we were still pretty pleased with ourselves to the point where even the steady spring drizzle didn’t seem to dampen our moods. When you need to go somewhere, and you can only go by bike, then you go by bike. The simplicity was oddly comforting. When we didn’t ride, we found ourselves walking around the city noticing things we hadn’t really noticed before.

The first hitch came when we dearly wanted to cash in a coupon from the Portland Nursery across town. How were we going to haul plants and mulch? That is when we discovered the beauty of the Zipcar. Like 823-BUMP, Zipcar filled the hole in our transportation options in no time. We took those big trips to the store, and ran luxuriously quick errands on dark rainy nights. We went to the coast when we wanted to. We got a puppy – who we now haul around in a Burley.

We admit that we have it lucky: we are close to a lot of services and there aren’t kids to schlep around. And while we miss hitting the trails as much as we used to, we now have a closer relationship to our travels. Like living on a farm, we know where our transportation food comes from.

I saw an interesting comment the other day, about the cognitive disconnect that people feel when they start to really understand the impact of cars. But I don’t feel any smugness in being car free, nor do I feel like I have escaped the disconnect. We use cars, and might have to buy one someday. But I can say that going car free was easier than I thought. Kind of like taking off the training wheels.

So here is the deal. We are open sourcing this because, 1) the world needs more three fingered gloves and 2) because some of you talented knitters out there can make this thing better, stronger, faster, cozier. So if you use this pattern and improve on it, please comment and let us know.

Hand Knitted S’mitten Pattern

Materials:

Any plied, worsted weight yarn. I used less that one skein of Brown Sheep Nature Spun.

Size US 10, straight and dpn

2 stitch markers

tapestry needle

Gauge:

Jeepers, not so sure. It doesn’t matter because you will be shrinking the be-jeezus out of them.

Cuff:

Cast on 40 sts. K in St st for 20 rounds. You can substitute ribbing here if you like, but once you felt it, any ribbing will be flattened out a fair bit.

Thumb Gusset:

Row 1: K 20 sts, place stitch marker on needle, inc one st in next st, k1, inc one st in next st, place second marker, k rest of row.

Row 2: K

Row 3: K to st marker, slip marker, increase one st in next st, k to last stitch before marker, inc on st in next st, slip marker, k rest of row.

Alternate rows 2 and 3 until there are fifteen sts between markers.

End by knitting one row plain.

Thumb:

Place first 20 sts on stitch holder or piece of scrap yarn. Distribute the 15 sts between markers on three dpns and place the remaining sts on a stitch holder or scrap yarn.

K 10 rounds.

Decrease as follows:

Row 1: K2, k2tog

Row 2: K

Row 3: K1, K2tog

Cut yarn and pull through remaining sts.

Hand:

Distribute hand sts on 3 dpns.

Knit 8 rounds, beginning round at the pinkie edge of the hand.

Pinkie and Ring Fingers:

Row 1: K 8 sts, c/o 4 sts using backward loop cast on, place 24 sts on holder, k remaining 8 sts. (20 st)

Row 2-12: K

Row 13: K1, ssk, k to 3 sts before the end of the row, k2tog, k1 (18 sts)

Row 14: K

Row 15: K1, ssk, k to 3 sts before end of row, k2tog, k1 (16 sts)

Row 16 K

Row 17: k1, ssk, k2, k2tog, k2, ssk, k2, k2tog, k1 (14 sts)

Row 18:K

Place sts on 2 needles and graft seam with kitchener stitch.

Middle and Index Fingers:

Place remaining live sts from holder onto 3 dpns.

Row 1: Pick up and knit 2 sts from between Ring and Pinkie Fingers and the Middle and Index Fingers (you will p/u and knit two more sts at the end of this round, so just grab the two sts immediately preceding the live sts.) Knit to end of row, p/u and k 2 sts from between fingers. (28 sts)

Rows 2-14: K

Row 15: K10 sts, k2tog, k2, ssk, k to end of row. (22 sts)

Row 16: K

Row 17: K9 sts, k2tog, k2, ssk, k, to end of row. (24 sts)

Row 18: K

Row 19: K1, ssk, k5, k2tog, k2, ssk, k to 3 sts before end of row, k2tog, k1. (18 sts)

Row 20: K

Place stitches on two needles and graft seam with kitchener stitch.

Finishing: Weave in the ends.

Make second S’mitten to match.

Felting: Hand wash and agitate both S’mittens in hot, soapy water until they shrink to the proper fit. Block and air dry, flat.

Of course, when I light that torch is when things really come together.  My focus narrows – which, when you see the eye goggles and fume mask I wear, you understand is somewhat inevitable.  Still, I really relish the state of intense concentration as I watch the flux change from pasty greenish blue, to dry and white, and finally wet out to a clear gloss as I move the heat around the joint.  Knowing when to add brass and how to manipulate it is an act of observation and restraint as much as an act of willful doing.  Even the brazing sequence (the order in which I braze joints) has a rhythm as much as logic.

When I turn off the torch, the meditation is over.

I recall the first book that I read in architecture school “The Nature and Art of Workmanship” by David Pye.  He wrote about the value of craft being in the risks that it entails.  Manufacturing leads to predictable, repeatable results or “the workmanship of certainty.”  In contrast, making things by hand allows for something unplanned to happen at any moment – “the workmanship of risk.”  But the real value of risk is the opportunity to work with what you observe, rather than merely operating on an object you think you already know.  This simple act is one of the things that makes every Sweetpea Bicycle different, and is just one of the reasons that learning something simple can take years or even decades to master.

Michael has been up to some interesting things.

We knew right from the start that we wanted to build bikes for women.  And knew that women seem to have a different relationship to their bikes than men.  Guys tend to dig the specs.  Women fall in love.  It doesn’t matter if the bike is 20 years old or brand spanking new; the same feeling is there, and that is half of what we wanted to capture with our name.  Sweetpea – a term of endearment. 

But as we were testing this idea on our focus group (Mom and Dad), we started to get the nagging feeling that maybe the name was just a little too cute.  And we just couldn’t see some of our super tough women friends riding something that screamed Hello Kitty.  And while women love their bikes, they are also strong and powerful while riding them.  So we decided to throw in a cup of toughness and the Sweetpea logo came into being:

Cute as a button.  Tough as nails.

But there was some bad business was out there, and we wanted to avoid it.  So last April we filed for a federal trademark, and I am happy to announce that the word “Sweetpea” is now a registered trademark of Sweetpea Bicycles covering frames and forks. 

Incidentally, the picture above is of our new headbadge.  It took a lot of thought, revisions, and help to come into being, but we like it and hope you like it too.

Topics include: Liver and onion ice cream, winning the lottery, an emotional immune system, and of course happiness. Runtime: 22 minutes.

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