By Julie Finn •
November 14, 2009
At an Upcycle Exchange event a couple of months ago, I scored the awesomest vintage wallpaper swatchbook ever. I have loads of vintage upholstery swatchbooks that I craft with probably every day, so I was super-stoked to receive a wallpaper swatchbook.
Until I actually tried to work with it. After totally thrashing the cutting mat for my Cricut, I realized that the wallpaper in this particular swatchbook was waaaaay too brittle to do most of the wallpaper craft projects that I’d had in mind.
And of course, there’s no point in actually wallpapering with any of the hundred or so 20″x20″ samples.
Or is there? Imagine a huge number of wallpaper swatches, all in complementary colors and patterns. Are you imagining what I’m imagining?
You betcha! Decoupage!
By Julie Finn •
May 26, 2009
I’m a novice gardener. I’ve been interested in gardening for a few years now, but since my two little girls will, this summer, turn 3 and 5, you can imagine, I’m sure, what the last five summers have been like for me. This year, however, I’m dedicated, I’m committed, I have two children who are happy and independent and love the outdoors, I have a next-door-neighbor who just cut down the tree in her front yard that loomed over my front yard–in other words, I am ready to garden.
I still don’t have an infinity of free time, however, and so not only am I gardening with the lasagna garden method, but I’m also basically eschewing nearly all ornamentals. I like my garden to be pretty, sure, but I also need it to multitask for me.
Multitasking means sunflowers, and speckled cranberry beans that climb them. It means kale in the border garden, and carrots in between the lilac bushes.
It also means that I’m growing many of the natural materials that I’d like to craft with in the coming year. Here’s a list of what I’m growing, and some other ideas for what you could put in your own crafty garden:
By Jahon •
April 28, 2009
The natural garden (also called ecological garden) is the result of a particular style of gardening based on the use of native flora, the recovery of natural vegetation, and compliance, where possible, to all components of the ecosystem well done.
The natural garden consists mainly of 3 types of vegetation: the forest, the hedge, the grass and a Solar Fountain
The natural garden is related to the garden low maintenance, which it shares with the [...]
By Brian Liloia •
March 5, 2009
Do you want to limit the amount of trash you produce and help make your backyard soil healthy and productive? One of the easiest solutions to these problems is to compost your food waste. It requires little personal energy, and you will benefit from the rich compost resulting from the breakdown of your kitchen scraps.
The only thing you really need to do is create a suitable bin for your soon-to-be compost. There are alternatives to the overpriced, plastic compost containers that some garden supply stores hawk to customers. You can make your own using recycled shipping pallets for less than $20, or even free if you have some of the few necessary supplies.
By Joel Bittle •
November 1, 2008
A new study in the December 2008 issue of the American Journal of Preventive Medicine suggests that an increase of green space in a neighborhood may decrease the chance for childhood obesity among neighborhood children.
By Brian Liloia •
October 28, 2008
In this day and age of highly processed, artificial ingredient-infested “food products”, fermentation offers a beautifully simple, healthy, and delicious alternative to preserving some of our favorite foods. Fermentation is a natural food preservation process typically requiring nothing more than very simple ingredients and time. Many popular, everyday foods would not exist without magical fermentation processes: sauerkraut, cheese, yogurt, miso, soy sauce, beer, and wine, just to name a few.
Fermentation not only preserves food, it makes food more nutritious and digestible, and the practice has spanned thousands of years. (Just one example: over 1000 years ago, Icelandic Vikings transformed milk cultured with rennet into skyr, a kind of thick yogurt-like cheese for later consumption.) It is a transformation made possible by bacteria and fungi. (I like to call it “controlled rotting”). For example: Salt some cabbage and throw it in a crock in the corner of your kitchen, and within a few weeks you’ll have delicious, aromatic sauerkraut, the result of a magical lactic acid fermentation.
By Joel Bittle •
October 26, 2008
Step outside Chicago’s Museum of Science and Industry’s back door and you’ll find a fully functioning, high-tech, modular, green wonder house. The project, called Smart Home: Green + Wired, showcases ways to go green, both major and minor. Inside the 2,500 square foot prefabricated home, you’ll find re-covered thrift store furniture surrounding a dining room table made from a slab of a fallen Michigan ash tree. The wall-mounted LCD screen controls not only the enertainment for the house but monitors the energy consumption of the entire house. Landscaping consisting of native prairie plants nearly eliminates the need for irrigation.
By Brian Liloia •
October 15, 2008
Isn’t it just so convenient that we flush our poop away, down the toilet, never to return? I mean, literally speaking, but metaphorically, too. We flush away our poop, like it’s a problem that we don’t want to deal with. But little do we realize, there’s value in everything, even that which might stink, and which we’d rather send away down a porcelain bowl.
Pooping is a natural process, and doing it in a bowl of drinking water (which must only later be treated with nasty chemicals so that we can reuse this same water) is a horrific waste, and polluting, too. That’s where the humanure system comes in.
The term “humanure” refers to human waste which is recycled by methods of composting, and which can later be used for gardening or agricultural purposes. Before you think: “I don’t want dookie on my daisies!”, remember that everything (everything natural, that is) breaks down in due time. So let’s talk about humanure, and how human waste can be more effectively recycled and reused, instead of letting it continue to pollute ever-precious drinking water supplies. Perhaps by the end of this post, you too will think that flushing your crap away is just as crazy as any other form of pollution.
By Brian Liloia •
October 9, 2008
If you’re excited by the possibility of cutting back on your home energy consumption and saving a few precious dollars on your energy bill, let me introduce you to the idea of hot box cooking.
A simple hot box provides a wise solution to preparing meals without the excessive use of your stovetop or oven. You can make a hot box (also called a “hay box”) for free, with very simple and recycled materials that you probably already have lying around your house, or with stuff that you can easily hunt down.
Green tourism is a more popular form of tourism. general travel is going more green. But more expert say that the global warming is also caused by travel.
Citing green hotels, coconut oil fuel for airlines and even recyclable golf tees, executives in one of the world’s largest industries say they are urgently trying to shrink tourism’s oversized environmental footprint.
But with global travel projected to keep soaring, and those very leaders still
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By Joel Bittle •
March 10, 2008
Since its inception in 1992, the ENERGY STAR program, a joint program run by the Environmental Protection Agency and the US Department of Energy, has sought to protect the environment by promoting energy efficiency. Starting with personal computers and monitors, ENERGY STAR established energy usage guidelines that set the bar for energy conservation. Over the years the ENERGY STAR program has brought just about anything that uses energy or water under its umbrella, saving an estimated $14 billion in energy costs in 1996. LEED for Homes and the NAHB’s Model Green Building Guidelines both encourage green home builders to use ENERGY STAR rated appliances. For those seeking additional credits - and energy savings - both green building programs encourage the use of very efficient clothes washers. But what exactly is a very efficient clothes washer?
A very efficient clothes washer saves both water and energy. Water Factor (WF) measures the number of gallons per cycle per cubic foot that the washer uses. In order to qualify as a very efficient clothes washer, it must have a WF of less than 5.5. To put that number into perspective, washers that have a WF of 8, the maximum for an ENERGY STAR labeled clothes washer, use up to 10,000 gallons of water a year. One of Asko’s UltraCare clothes washers boasts of a WF of 3.4, using under 3,000 gallons of water a year. Granted, at 1.9 cubic feet the Asko model is quite small, but if water efficiency is the goal, Asko sets the standard.
