Green Options

Via the UK Telegraph, I recently learned about Alex Queral, an artist currently living in Philadelphia, PA who creates portraits of celebrities and politicians, but what is interesting about him is that he carves these portraits out of discarded phone books.

Queral started using phonebooks when off looking for some wood and happened upon some abandoned phone books. They can be advantageous to use as they are often a free material that can be found in recycle bins and trash piles. Queral carves the famous faces into the phone books and slowly peels away the layers to create a low relief sculptural portrait.

Pratt was the star of this year’s ICFF Design Schools’ Exhibition with their Design for a Dollar contest. Amazingly, with the design constraint of using a buck or less, the Pratt students invented brilliant eco home ideas (many upcycled from totally discarded items). The competition required students to create designs that include manufacturing costs, transportation, energy, material, labor and waste issues.

CONGRATULATIONS to Tina in Boston for winning our giveaway of Sewing Green! Be on the look out for an email from us for further details.

Thank you to everyone who entered. We here at CAGW have been rejuvenated and inspired by all of your upcycling ideas! Don’t forget your other chances to win this beautiful book, you can find out where to enter here.

I know you’ve waited with bated breath so here it is, your chance to win a copy of Sewing Green, the latest and greatest book by Betz White, author of Warm Fuzzies.

Sewing Green offers 25 cute projects made from repurposed or organic materials. Learn how to make aprons and wallets from dress shirts, and sandwich wraps, and lounge pants from organic and thrifted fabrics. The projects are are direct and easy to follow even for this crafter who likes to skip ahead and tweak things. I especially like the sandwich wrap project and the use of PUL - a material that is not vinyl and one that I need to look into more.

White’s favorite project from the book is the woodland draft buster, a much more refined version of the draft catcher that I created a while back. This version looks like an adorable tree branch that helps you save money on your heating bill. White wanted everything in the book to have a good purpose without being preachy. She wanted everything to be fun and easy and show that any one can do these projects and be eco-friendly. “You don’t have to suffer,” she said. “Suffering is not involved.”

Continue reading to enter the contest!

Have you ever come across a craft project and just couldn’t wait to go home and try it? For me it was this simple and really cool project from the queen of craft: Martha Stewart. Perfect for Easter egg dying or just because.

Using silk ties that are destined for Good Will, a bit of scrap fabric, and boiling water, you can dye eggs. Yup, dye them with the ties! It is sort of like magic, or chemical reactions even.

Need another reason to craft and possibly win pretty awesome prizes? If you’ve already entered the Threadless Loves Green T-Shirt Design Challenge, get ready to switch gears and get your upcycle on.

To upcycle all’s you need to do is take ordinary materials, craft left overs or items destined for the trash or recycle bin, and turn them into something new and better.

Once you do that, you can enter your new and improved crafty awesome into the Upcycle Contest with Sublime Stitching.

The Rose and Radish gallery and boutique in San Francisco offers a fresh mix of springtime creativity!

I am inspired by this creative way to upcycle felt with these little tabletop cup cozies. Their goals for showcasing craft designs are admirable and charming:

Are you an avid reader and fan of the literary arts? Have you ever been to a book art opening? Reading Elle Decoration recently, I found this lovely post on the subject.

“Food and Interior Stylist, Paul Lowe of Sweet Paul has been styling a series called The Written Word“. The paper sculpture vases and the picture holder in the pics above show some of Paul’s creative spark.

If your in the mood to create functional upcycled art here is an adorable tutorial on how to make a book table, if you are looking for a stylish book recycling project.

Adventure Ecology is taking to the sea and setting sail from San Fransisco and heading to Australia. The catch? Their boat is made from water bottles. How cool is that? They are also teaming up with Sculpt the Future Foundation to challenge you to come up with something just as awesome to do with trash.

So get your thinking caps on, brush up on your upcycling and take that trash and turn it into treasure for the SMART Art ‘Trash into Treasure’ competition. Your sculpture, functional item, photograph, video or music could net you fame and fortune, or a winning cash prize, as long as you can show reuse.

Mark Montano affixes an urban corsage on actress Anya Monzikova

The Sundance Film Festival kicked off on January 15th and wrapped up yesterday. In amongst the films and snow, celebrity attendees participated in green crafting at an event called The Green Lodge with Mark Montano author of The Big Ass Book of Crafts. The craft-a-thon was sponsored by Amazing EcoGlue from Eclectic Products, Inc.

The Green Lodge focused on eco-crafting by using products that can be recycled, upcycled and restyled. Celebrities including KayCee Stroh of High School Musical cast, Aubrey O’Day from Making of the Band 3, actress Anya Monzikova from Tropic Thunder and a Deal or No Deal alumna, and Alice Greczyn from Privileged and Lincoln Heights, were were inspired to create eco-chic and sustainably stylish projects and gifts alongside the expert crafter and designer.

Here’s another great example of good design, craftiness and a nod to the environment, all in a small card.

The Baltimore Center for Design has a utilitarian goal, one that will bring together the city’s designers for the purpose of discussion, and to provide community members a valuable resource. As an up and comer, the Center for Design is all volunteer run, with little to no budget. Though this is a challenge it has not stopped them from moving foward with all the things that a resource like this needs, all with an environmental bent.

Their business cards are made from the extra runs that a print shop uses to get their press set. These test sheets usually end up as waste, but not in this instance. Working with their local printer they were able to source these test prints for free!

To personalize the cards, the Center for Design used label paper and printed up their url and attached the labels to the cards. The result is a simple and easy way to make buisness cards.

As the holidays start to wind down, I’ve taken a look around my house and realized that I have a lot of left over things that accompany all the gift giving. One of the bigger boxes that was shipped to me was packed with those pesky peanuts. Having no idea what to do with them, I started poking around for some ideas on what to do with my snowy, sticky, new friends.

Since I don’t work in an office, How to Fill an Office with Packing Peanuts seems out. Which is too bad because it looks like an awesome prank!

The next best thing to do with them, if you don’t have an office to pull off the prank, is to use them for what they were made for in the first place - packing! Sentimental Holiday ornaments and decorations can be safe and snug for the next year when you reuse the peanuts as you put away these things.

Use them loose or wrap them in newspaper so they don’t go flying everywhere. Gently nestle the more breakable pieces and feel secure in knowing that they will be safe until you pull them out next year.