Welcome to this issue of Stumped by Nature, where we notice nature lurking just beyond our screens, curate a list of outside-y events in Austin, and build community with other folks in the thick of the startup ecosystem.
In this week’s issue:
🌿 Cyanotypes
🌤️ Upcoming outdoors events
🥬 Local Farmers Markets
Let’s dig in!
-Nicole
PS. In case you didn’t see the email Tuesday, I’m starting a community for readers of this newsletter—a place for the nature-curious to meet great people, find more niche outside events, and celebrate your outdoors wins. Emphasis is on community.
There are just a handful of Founding Member spots left, and we’ll officially launch the group by February 16. This city is full of fascinating people, with incredible outside-leanings just below the surface. I can’t wait for you to meet them. Join us!
NATURE SPOTLIGHT
Q: What do you get when you combine Ferric Ammonium Citrate, Potassium Ferricyanide, water, plants, and sunlight?
A. Science! (Or straight-up sorcery, depending on your relationship with chemistry.)
Another acceptable answer: cyanotype.
With something named Winter Storm Fern keeping us homebound last weekend, did we really have a choice but to incorporate nature?
Several weeks ago, I saw the Butler team’s LinkedIn post detailing their (absolutely brilliant) idea to create a holiday card by taking the team to a ranch, hanging out with a botanist, and creating cyanotypes with the nature they came across during a December hike. Materials included collected rainwater for rinsing the photosensitive chemicals. Wild.
I did what any rational creature would do—acquired a cyanotype starter kit and prepared to imitate, imitate, imitate.
And so, as the storm drew us inward, my kids went to their respective pillow forts, I pillaged the limping bouquets from my previous weekend’s flower exchange, begged a bundled pal to grab snips of maidenhair fern and wood oats from the frozen trail, and settled in to consider Prussian blue compounds and an unwavering faith in the power of the sun.
The Origin Story
If Fiona Robinson’s The Bluest of Blues is to be trusted (and given that it’s a children’s book about a Victorian botanist, I’m choosing to believe everything), Anna Atkins grew up with a scientist father who did the radical thing of teaching his daughter Latin naming systems and actual science during a time when most girls were learning needlepoint and how to faint decoratively.
She became a collector and recorder of plants. Pressing flowers. Illustrating specimens. Building a catalog of the natural world with the tools available to her. Like Where the Crawdads Sing, but with a British accent and less murder.
Then came the problem: Atkins had hundreds of botanical samples that needed to be documented. The printing press existed, sure, but illustrations were expensive and time-consuming, and she had algae to archive.
Enter: Sir John Herschel, British scientist, who in 1842 discovered a photographic process that created white images on a deep blue background. He’d invented it to copy his own notes and diagrams, in other words, boring, practical things.
Atkins saw it. Borrowed it. Applied it to her pain point. And in doing so, created what’s considered the first book illustrated with photographic images.
Surely you have botanical documenting needs too.
How To Cyanotype Like a Novice
In addition to your starter kit, you’re going to need:
Materials to imprint
Patience
A willingness to be humbled
The things in your control: the composition of your found objects.
The things out of your control: the conditions of the light, how that exposure impacts timelines, when the process reveals itself
The organizing principle for this section of newsletter is one part stream of consciousness, one part photo diary. Good luck.
The learning process
Top left: maidenhair and wood oats, crushing it
Top right: spent bouquet—chamomile and some green globular filler
Bottom left: female yaupon, wood oats, senna pods, double layer of acrylic to try to smoosh, which absolutely backfired in color purity
Bottom right: I think I over-rinsed this? Or underexposed it? Probably both?
My field notes:
Work quickly to place your materials on the photo-sensitive paper. This is best in not-your-sunniest-room.
If visual sharpness as an end result matters to your artistic soul, you’ll want to smoosh materials until they are quite flat. Or choose materials that are naturally flat.
I felt compelled to press my nature bits under an acrylic board, and struggled to clamp it without having noticeable white clip marks on the finished piece. Bigger acrylic or smaller chemical paper would have solved this, but mine were identically sized. Offset layering of two acrylic boards still didn’t solve my visible clip situation, and also clouded/generally butchered the final color. Maybe zero acrylic would have had more pure color results? Or we can try to mentally embrace more ghostly prints?
If you’re desperate for a bigger, clear, gently clampable smooshing surface, don’t grab the museum quality glass from your framed prints in your hallway—the UV resistance would cause needless suffering
Maidenhair fern and wood oats from my favorite trail, attempt 1. Ready for sunlight.
Borrowing the seedlings’ grow light for attempt two because 1. cold 2. dark. 3. novice
Background color shift = progress
Soaked up the sun.
Dunked in little cookie sheet tub
Drip drying on the line, but also, look at it! The contrast!
The Bigger Picture
There’s something deeply stabilizing about making art from the backyard—plucking senna pods, considering the agarita, arranging the silhouettes, letting the sun do the rest.
It’s the same satisfaction as foraging yaupon for tea. As identifying squirrels by their bellies. As noticing the conditions just before cedar starts its annual pollen assault.
These small acts of attention compound. They rewild the mundane. They allow you to create something blue and strange and your own.
The Bigger Bigger Picture
As I’m wrapping up this writing on newsletter-eve, I’m fresh from an incredibly thoughtful event that pulled together folks in nature-related professions. Of the (many!) meaningful conversations, I ended the night on an especially high note—pondering with a couple of women about our role in how this world evolves, and how the people we surround ourselves with can help us grow in directions we want to grow.
And, importantly, fully geeking out over cyanotypes.
Specifically, one woman had been part of the Butler cyanotype crew, and she mentioned an imprint of snake skin, pinned with sunlight, now framed in her home.
Cue jaw drop.
And photo request.
And so, here, where nature and community overlap, is where we can grow if we let ourselves.
What. a. world.
BTW
Is this too opportunistic of a transition to, uh, re-mention the ATX Outsiders community? We’re building the room for people to connect meaningfully. Meaningful conversations are happening in person if you know where to look, and we no longer have to leave that up to fate. We are actively making it happen.
VOTING SEASON
With elections coming up, the last day to be registered in Travis County is February 2. Make sure you’re on the list!
UPCOMING EVENTS
🗓️ January 30: Pitch and Run ATX: Run with founders, funders, and folks in tech
🗓️ January 31: Owl Pellet Dissection: Roughly an hour out of Austin, but how often do get to pluck rodent skeletons out of regurgitation?
🗓️ January 31: Golf for Beginners: Start with some club swinging, finish with some Lockhart BBQ
🗓️ January 31: The Board Walks Bring a thoughtful topic, and get your steps in
🗓️ January 30: Yaupon Tasting at The Red Fridge (Founders only) Perhaps the waitlist will see some movement?
🗓️ February 1 Trail Cleanup Workday
🗓️ Through February 1: Fortlandia
🗓️ February 2: Umlauf After Dark : Lunar New Year
🗓️ February 4: GirlSwirl Skateboarding: Beginner friendly
🗓️ February 6: Large Log Giveaway: Not a euphemism
🗓️ February 6: Ikebana: aka "the way of flowers,” specifically minimalistic arranging. RSVP by February 4
🗓️ February 7: Birding and Nature Hike at Nalle Bunny Run
🗓️ February 13: Paranormal Investigations: Friday the 13 + Valentine’s Eve + Ghosts + Outside time? If your lover is as spooky as you, this is your time to shine.
🗓️ March 7: First Saturday Plant Walk at Forest Beach: these spots fill up quickly, so playing the long game with this RSVP (Thanks for the heads up on this, Thomas!)
LOCAL FARMERS’ MARKETS
👩🌾 Arboretum Food & Artisan Market Saturdays 11am-3pm
👩🌾 Barton Creek Farmers Market Saturdays 9am-1pm
👩🌾 Lakeline Farmers Market Saturdays 9am-1pm
👩🌾 SFC Farmers’ Market Downtown Saturdays 9am-1pm
👩🌾 SFC Farmers’ Market Sunset Valley Saturdays 9am-1pm
👩🌾 Texas Farmers’ Market at Bell Saturdays 9am-1pm
👩🌾 Texas Farmers’ Market at Mueller Sundays 10am-2pm
CRITTER CORNER
Why did the turkey cross the road?
The make Northwest Hills absolutely lose their minds over this treasured new resident.
One of these may or may not have been photoshopped.
Extreme gratitude for Mehmet and Erin for bringing this to my attention and sending photos from the neighborhood vault.
That’s all for this week!
In the meantime, I hope you wear plenty of sunscreen, because, as cyanotypes know, UV light is no joke.
-Nicole
OPTIONAL SIDE QUESTS
🪵 Let’s chat about what you’re seeing in this (gestures broadly) tech/nature/Austin community building/writing realm. Grab some time on my calendar.
🪵 Do you need to commission a writer? I’m happy to discuss projects that might make me cry in public/funnel my experiential/existential dread into essays like this one.
🪵 Is this newsletter not your vibe? Forward it to your enemies to make them suffer too.
💰It’s safe to assume there are affiliate links, and I’ll monetarily benefit from any purchases you make. Hooray, capitalism! So far, this newsletter has generated $3.46 of cold hard cash. 💸