You may have noticed we don’t have a traditional registry! We found that a lot of the prebuilt solutions for providing guidance on what kinds of gifts could best assist us in this upcoming chapter of our life disproportionately forced us to endorse/request specific, brand-new, often mass produced items. This is convenient, but does not reflect how we typically like to go about home-making and improving the material aspects of our creative, recreational, culinary, and hosting capacities.

We like to source tools, hardware, furnishings and materials fairly opportunistically; we might do this by browsing estate sales, through local buy-nothing and barter groups, or by researching a particular well constructed product, ideally with an ethical supply chain, and waiting patiently to purchase one on a sale or on discount through a wholesaler.

If you feel want to celebrate our marriage partly by making some material contribution to us –which we by no means want you to feel obliged to do-- consider trying to obtain gifts through these sorts of capital-efficient & opportunistic channels, or perhaps by contributing funds directly towards our upcoming honeymoon travels.

As for what might make good gifts for us: we like practical, sturdy, multi-use items, particularly ones with natural materials and color palettes. We like sturdy and repairable things, but we also adore little decorations, particularly ones that play with geometry & light, and enjoy vine & cat motifs.

Our home is full of lots of greens, browns, and autumn colors, and signs of mending are visible and beloved in our clothes and cups and furniture. We have most of the typical household goods (plates, bowls, comfy furniture, pots and pans, cast iron, sheets, towels, bookshelves, etc), but could benefit from more laundry room organizers and nicer natural-fiber queen sheets and natural-fiber towels. We are quite fond of interesting mirrors and eye catching light fixtures and window ornaments. We are building out a nice sound system in our living room and could really use a few dozen yards of speaker-wire.

We enjoy hosting medium sized gatherings, and do a lot of large-group event cooking for parties, picnics, and protests around Atlanta for groups of 10 to 100. Catering equipment (like chafing dishes, *large* pots, warmers, cambros for transporting things while keep them hot), folding tables and chairs, tablecloths, Italian water jugs, steel camping plates & steel cups, pretty servingware, large steel mixing bowls, catering tents, patio warmers, and things of the like would be very helpful in supporting our efforts on this front. We have an induction stove, so if you are considering buying cookware, please check that that is compatible with induction.

We also like backpacking and glamping! We have started to curate a popup living room environment for some of our more social outdoor events. We would love to expand this to include a portable kitchen setup so that we can make meals with fresh and foraged ingredients. This popup kitchen setup might involve things like a camping griddle, solar-rechargeable battery, a firepit, bins for food transport, and a handwashing & dishwashing station (potentially made out of PVC and plastic bins, or something fancier, we’ve just imagined having to build this somewhat improvisationally).

For our hobbies, we do a lot of home improvement, indoor gardening, and canning. For home improvement, we have an orbital sander, a jigsaw, and a circular saw as well as an assortment of common hand tools. We would benefit a lot from a miter saw and a table saw, and would also generally appreciate having nicer hand tools for when we are building in places (like out near my dad’s log cabin project) where electricity is not accessible. For canning, we have a decent assortment of jars (though more jars are *always* welcome), are running kind of low on lids, and we would benefit greatly from a larger pressure canner, or an electric pressure canner that doesn’t need to take up stove space. We shop a fair amount at microcenter and backmarket for a variety of computers, parts, and other electronic equipment, though the particular things we are looking for there tend to be precise and change more quickly. 

We are not aiming or expecting to collect all these items directly; we are just hoping to provide examples of the sorts of things that come to mind when we think about material things that would make us happy, and improve our home life, our projects, and our adventures. If you would like to browse a list of items that can serve as further inspiration, you can find that list here.

If you’re interested in sponsoring some of the expenses we and our affinity groups encounter in our activism and volunteering work, please reach out and we can talk to you about options that exist to enable the kind of support you are looking to give.

Signal: eclecticlibrary.31

Email: epeacock@eclecticlibrary.org or jwroe@eclecticlibrary.org