This is the view right now from my studio window. It doesn't get much better than this.
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Spring is finally here! . . . at least, where I live in southern Ontario (Zone 6a). At this time of year, as excited as I am to get going on gardening, I always forget what I should be doing in the garden: what needs to be pruned when, what should be fertilized, what can be moved and what can't, etc. This year, I'm writing things down in a new garden journal I got from my excellent-gift-giving husband, Dan. (For Christmas and my birthday - both in the dead of winter - he often gets me gardening stuff, which is always a treat.) So I thought I'd share a few of the spring gardening tips I've collected in various places and written down:
4/24/2013 Tubular Tutorial: Create a Craft Organization Station with Recycled Toilet Paper RollsRead NowMy new favourite discovery is the virtuous versatility of the toilet paper roll. This sturdy paper tube is handy for so many things, and I find myself using it more and more in my studio to organize art and craft tools. My newest endeavour is an organization station (yes, I'm rhyming on purpose) for all my markers - made with 28 recycled toilet paper rolls - and I thought I'd tutorialize the process for those of you who could benefit from some colourful tidiness.
I set my end piece of hardwood flooring inside the long side of the shoe box. If you have no room to set your weighting inside, just adhere it to the bottom of the box.
We've all seen it: the tissue paper carnage that results from Christmas mornings, birthdays, baby showers and wedding showers. Giant clouds of tissue paper get stuffed into big garbage bags to be put on the curb, bound for the landfill. Tissue paper is one of those grey area products when it comes to recycling. Some municipalities won't recycle tissue paper because it often contains additives - like wax, glitter or foil - that are problematic in the recycling process. We can, of course, reuse tissue paper in our own gift wrapping and packaging, but in doing so, we can't be certain that it won't get thrown away. Lucky for us, we don't need to throw away tissue paper or recycle it because there are so many marvelous household and creative uses for the stuff. I'll focus on some creative uses in this post. Tissue paper is marvelous stuff to use in art because you can manipulate it and layer it in so many ways to create really cool effects. I'll show you some examples from my own work. I created these art cards using tissue paper:
You can also use tissue paper to make something called "crystalline paper". All you need is some gloss medium and some freezer paper to use as a work surface. To learn how to make it, check out this easy tutorial about how to make crystalline paper, or watch this video about how to make crystalline paper. Look how super fun it is:
This just scratches the surface of all the marvelous creative things you can do with tissue paper. And the great thing is, it's no problem to store because you can smush it into whatever space you have available!
You know how sometimes you get so inspired that you can hardly contain it, like you want to burst? That's how I felt when my sister-in-law forwarded me a little video about a youth orchestra in Paraguay that plays instruments made from trash. They call themselves the Landfill Harmonic. The group is based in the town of Cateura, which is - in essence - built on a landfill. Many people make their living by scrounging through the trash to find things they can sell and recycle. The town is plagued by crime and drugs, and more than 40% of the youth don't finish school because their parents need them to work. In this dereliction, the Landfill Harmonic is a hope-inspiring creative outlet for the kids who call Cateura home. Maria, a member of Landfill Harmonic A documentary about the ensemble has been in the works for a couple years, and the film's trailer has been gaining popularity on web and media outlets. And today - April 1, 2013 - the Landfill Harmonic began a campaign to raise funds to take the youth orchestra on a world tour. You can find out more about the campaign - and hey, even donate - by visiting the Landfill Harmonic movie site. I could write a lot more, but really, the video says it so much better than I ever could. You'll be amazed by how beautiful scraps of tin and an old oil drum can sound. Have a look and a listen, and prepare to be mind-blowingly inspired. Sometimes while working in my studio, I listen to podcasts from CBC Radio. The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) has some excellent radio programs: Q with Jian Ghomeshi is one I check in on regularly because it features an array of people working in arts and culture - often on the fringes of the mainstream. A recent February episode of Q - guest hosted by Canadian singer-songwriter Jann Arden (whose wit I have always appreciated) - featured an interview with Phoebe Baker Hyde who wrote the book, The Beauty Experiment. The gist of the book - and the interview - is that Baker Hyde spent a year living outside the beauty conventions that society promotes for women through media, advertising and various industries. The book explains her personal experience through the experiment, explores beauty conventions from other cultures and explains practical tips for women to use in simplifying and challenging their own beauty routines. To me, Baker Hyde's most interesting suggestion during the interview was the simple act of leaving a store before making a decision to buy something. How many times do we buy something on impulse only to have it sit untouched in our closets or makeup drawers? Though I've worked on it over the years, I'm still guilty of making pointless purchases. Baker Hyde suggests that, when you find something you want to buy, have a good look at it, and then leave the store. If it still seems like a good purchase after you've had some time to mull it over, and maybe had a look at other options, go back to the store and make the purchase. Of course, this isn't always practical or efficient, but I think the principle is a good one. As I've pondered Baker Hyde's suggestion over the last while, I've begun to realize some of the dumb reasons I walk out of a store with a purchase:
This past weekend - armed with all these ponderings - I managed to leave two stores with nothing in my hands. One was even an art supply store, so that's a huge accomplishment for me. I was looking for a very specific storage solution for my studio, and almost gave in to buying something "close enough" when I couldn't find what I really wanted. In the end, my forbearance payed off when I found exactly what I wanted after doing some research online. So from now on, each time I leave a store, I'm going to picture a big red stop sign on the door that says: "Do you really need to buy that?" Hopefully I'll have a little more money in my pocket and a little less crap around the house. A year ago, my husband, Dan, and I bought a comfy new couch to replace an old pine futon we had inherited from friends many moons ago. The futon sat in the basement for a while as we avoided figuring out what to do with it, until we finally got tired of maneuvering around it and had to decide its fate. Unfortunately, the mattress went to the dump . . . it's pretty hard these days to find anywhere to donate a used futon mattress, and I was too overwhelmed by the thought of trying to upcycle it. But I knew there were tons of things I could do with all that pine from the futon frame. So Dan obliged my whim and kindly dismantled the frame for me. He's so great. A couple months ago, an upcycling project dawned on me for the futon frame wood: bedside tables. For our entire married life, our bedside tables have consisted of whatever we have found around the house that can hold a lamp and an alarm clock. I've never done any real carpentry, but I thought I'd use the futon wood to try my hand at building something a little more spiffy for our bedsides. And hey, I'm always stoked about any opportunity to play with power tools. My first step was to sort out all the pieces of the dismantled futon to see if I would have enough wood for two tables. I did! Then I had to remove the staples that had been used in the construction of the original futon. They came out easily with pliers. Here are my pieces of wood, organized and ready to go. As a carpentry novice, I needed a simple table plan to follow. I'm definitely not smart enough to figure it out by myself. I searched online and found this simple, excellent plan for a plant stand made from a recycled wood pallet. I adjusted it slightly for my rectangular tables, but the instructions were just what I needed. Here are the beginnings of my tables: the side legs. If you look very closely, boys and girls, you can see the tools I used: compound mitre saw (at the top left of the picture), drill, wood glue, tape measure, right angle thingy, countersink bit and drill bits. Oh, and screws of course. Soon my cutting and measuring started to look like tables, and to my delighted surprise, they didn't even wobble! It was at this stage that I decided I would leave the tables unpainted: I like the rough quality of the pine and the curious dings and holes that show the wood's original purpose. And here's the finished product: sturdy tables with shelves underneath for books and stuff. I'm thrilled with the results. I love the fact that I have some upcycled furniture that's truly functional, that I made myself. Furniture that has served our home continues to serve us in a new way.
"Tree of Life" made from recycled oil drum
One of my favourite places on earth to shop is Ten Thousand Villages. It's rare that I can walk by a store and not go inside. Ten Thousand Villages is a program of The Mennonite Central Committee, and its chief aim is to provide "opportunities for artisans in developing countries to earn income by bringing their products and stories to [other] markets through long-term, fair trading relationships". I have enormous respect for the MCC and the Ten Thousand Villages program, and I can't say enough about the wonderful things they sell. So, each month on my blog, I'll feature one of the artisans or artisan organizations Ten Thousand Villages represents. Haiti is not an easy place to live. Violence and political instability are constant, and a staggering 80% of the country's population lives below the poverty line. Adding enormous insult to injury, the catastrophic earthquake in 2010 left over a million people homeless and completely devastated the economy. Since 1973, Comité Artisanal Haitïen (CAH) has worked to encourage Haiti's rich artisanal heritage by helping artisans develop their businesses and find local and foreign markets for their products. CAH represents over 200 artisans in various craft traditions, including stone carving, metal sculpture, paper maché, horn and bone, basketry and natural fiber weaving. The partnership between the artisans and CAH generates incomes to support approximately 1,800 people. Since the 2010 earthquake, CAH has added a new initiative called the Haitian Design Centre, where artisans can generate more designs to ensure the sustainability of their work and income. Talk about amazing. "Face of the Sun" oil drum sculpture I'm particularly fascinated by the metal drum artisans that CAH represents. The craft is unique to Haiti, and it began in the 1940's in a town called Croix des Bouquets, where all the empty oil drums from nearby Port-au-Prince were dumped. Local artisans reclaimed the waste by refashioning it and combining it with other materials to make beautiful art. Because of the artists' resourcefulness with steel drum waste, Crois des Bouquets is no longer littered with steel drums, and the artists now purchase used drums to create their art. There's something very poignant about artists making beautiful art out of rubble in a country with a worldwide reputation for being a political and economic mess. As Haiti struggles to rise from the ashes, the steel drum artisans' creations are perhaps a sign of hope and strength and promise. *All art images courtesy of Ten Thousand Villages |
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Jane Hogeterp Koopman
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