There are five of us. While we live all over the Pacific Northwest (jealous?) with very different lives, all of us are tied together by a few common threads - a genuine desire to be good to our families, our earth, and ourselves. We like to do domestic things and don’t care that domesticity is slightly uncool. We are on a quest to grow our own food, bake our own bread, and raise our own poultry. Not to mention milk our own goats, plumb our own houses, and create our own art. You get the picture.
Late one August night in 2008, two spectacular nurses gave birth. To a blog, not a baby. Still, the Balls Out Domestic Club came into the world much like babies do- at a hospital, with nurses (but with less grunting and bodily fluid). Megan and Laura were sitting at work, and Megan was reading Animal, Vegetable, Miracle. They talked about gardens and how much they each wanted one. Then Megan started talking about taking a gardening class and it snowballed from there into picking fruit, canning fruit, pickling fruit, and wait, what about breadmaking? And haven't you wanted to start knitting again? Yeah! And I've got a wheat grinder, we should get together and use it, and cheese! We could make cheese! Or maybe a compost bin and chickens. Or maybe just all of it.
They decided to start a club to chronicle their new adventures. And in the spirit of going balls out, the Balls Out Domestic Club was, well, born. Megan called her old college friend Annie, who had never even met Laura and Annie called her childhood friend Krysten who had never met Megan or Laura. Then time went by and Laura moved on and Krysten mentioned Christy, a childhood friend of both Annie and Krysten. Annie called Rachel, who lives down the street, and that was that. Megan lives on the Oregon coast but works in the city, Krysten lives on an island but grew up in the Cascade foothills, Christy lives in the Cascade foothills only in Oregon and Annie and Rachel live in Central Washington (in the Cascade foothills, of course). Got it? Good!
Anyway, more time went by. We learned, we blogged, we forgot about the blog, we screwed lots of stuff up, we blogged some more, we had babies, we blogged, screwed more stuff up, we learned... you get the picture. And now?
Megan more or less has a dairy farm. With a garden, goats and chickens- not to mention 32 whole acres! Annie cans despite her aversion to food-borne illnesses (the nurses have helped coach her through) and gardens and keeps chickens on her meager but mighty 0.16 acre. Krysten knits (she even owns her own online yarn store) and has crazy cooking and home remodeling skills. Rachel has more style in her pinky finger than the entire state of New Jersey (sorry New Jersey, we had to pick a state 'cause Rach has loads of style and those Jersey Shore kids cost you). Christy is the most balls out person we know (seriously, she is a firefighting, helicopter flying domestic goddess).
We like the challenge of learning new things, and getting crazy good at old skills. We like feeling like we can make something that is better and more meaningful than what we can buy. We don’t have perfect houses, or even clean ones. We certainly don’t pretend to know it all. Sometimes our efforts are wildly successful. Sometimes, well… not so much. There have been some epic disasters (see label "whoops")! But along the way, we have blogged about it.
Those of you (that way, it sounds like a lot) who have been with us from the beginning will notice a few changes. Almost all of 2009 and 2010 is a bloggy void because we switched hosts blah blah blah. Laura has moved on and Christy and Rachel have joined us. But you should stick around. It is still balls out, no holds barred, with aprons. (That we sewed). (Ourselves). (But not monogrammed because that's still too hard). (But maybe later).
