Tale Spin - Story Telling Event

 

Thursday January 28th at 8:30pm, I'm going to be telling stories as part of DeAnne Smith's kinda monthly story telling event "Tale Spin." This will be my first time sharing my stories publicly, so it should be interesting. I plan to share a few tales involving dogs and hairstyles, but not dog hairstyles. It might also be the last time for a few months to see DeAnne perform, as she's heading south for a few months of touring down-under. $5 tiny dollars at le Cagibi.  

Desautels Business Conference on Sustainability 2010: A Catalyst for Change

On Friday November 29th, I'm participating in a round table discussion on the "Moral Obligation of Management Education" as part of the 2010 Desautels Business Conference on Sustainability. The conference will be held January 28-30 at McGill University in Montreal, Quebec. The theme is "A Catalyst for Change".

"Students and professionals from all over North America will be getting together to discuss current issues about sustainability, focusing on the three realms of sustainability that affect and are affected by today's business practices: social, economic and environmental." get more details at the website.

Cooling rack revision

Being the instructables junkie that I am, I recently came across as posting for a Floating Multi-Use Wall Storage device. I was immediately attracted to the project, and decided that I would undertake the construction of one such device for the storage of my "jewelry", which otherwise occupied a lonely spot in a basket under the bathroom sink. Not the best location to display the general sort of accoutrement prone to dandies.

I did not have any 1/4" hardware cloth - the sort of thing you might use for molding cement, in my experience, nor did I want to go out an acquire such a thing for the purposes of this project. Instead, I used a forlorn cooling rack that had not seen the light of day since it became relatively easy to find vegan baked goods around town. I had to use slightly larger washers given the spacing on my rack, and lag bolts rather than screws, for aesthetic reasons. I think the rod coupling nuts (5/16"-18 x 7/8"), really make this work both visually and functionally.



And Voila! This was an incredibly easy project, and honestly, I find it an elegant, if not somewhat unconventional,addition to my dressing chambers. For the smaller objects, such as label pins, I glued a few magnets behind some thick, pin-able material and stuck that onto the rack.


I actually don't really have enough "jewelery" to make full use of the space now available to me. I suppose I will now have to undertake some tie pin and cuff-link making projects....

Paint Can spot light.

Upon moving into my new flat a few years a go, I undertook the fairly typical process of repainting the whole place. Lucky for me, it being a small flat, this only took a few cans of paint (I used Ben Moore's EcoSpec, which has no VOCs) and a few friends. At the end of the day, I was left with a number of empty paint cans and a sense that there was something more that could be done with them than simply dropping them off at the local EcoCentre for recycling.

I was presented with the additional challenge of adequately lighting a beautiful piece of sculptural work that I had just purchased from a friend of mine, Stephen Kawai. That's how I came to create the paint can spot light.

I'm a fan of the "as is section" of Ikea. Often you can find bags of random light fixtures. I like to buy those bags and therefore always have a few random light fixtures in my craft closet. Lamp making is a fun little past time, and a fairly common way to make use of old materials.

After cleaning and spray-painting one of the paint cans, I drilled a hole in the side of the can and placed a white GRUNDTAL fixture at the bottom of it. This is commonly used as a kitchen counter-top spotlight.



On the whole, it's pretty basic, but it works really well. I have a few more cans and ideas for how to make them into neat light fixtures. Another day, another craft project, another post.

Inspiration: Yong Ho Ji

Yong Ho Ji is a Korean born sculptor and artist who builds mutant "monsters" out of rubber tires. He takes a modified natural material, rubber tires, and transforms familiar and somewhat threatening animals into beautiful yet unnatural creatures.

Tire waste is clearly a problem in car-centered societies such as ours (according to the Environmental Protection Agency, at least 290 million scrap tires are generated in the United States each year). Yong Ho Ji presents one of many reuses of this incredibly common waste material. Otherwise, whole tires have been reused as bumpers for boats, highway barriers and less commonly as a construction material for home building. It is not uncommon to now find recycled tire crumb in mats, stair treading and in athletic fields. It's amazing how a material so commonly used for a sole purpose can have such a variety of afterlives - probably not uncommon for most of our waste, when you think about it.

Clearly, one man's waste is another man's treasure. In 2008, one of Ji's sharks went for $145,000 USD at auction.

Starting simple: the bleach bottle magazine holder.

Briefly – I’m not a fan of bleach, but I’ve had this bottle kicking around for a while. I recently celebrated the end of what I imagine might be the final bottle of bleach to enter my home (check out some bleach alternatives). At about the same time, I was looking for a way of storing a little bathroom reading in a way that was functional and unobtrusive.

I remember that my mother had used a bleach bottle to store clothes pins. So... thanks mom, smart thinking! Here’s what I did. All it took was an basic utility knife.


I was actually pleasantly surprised to discover that the bottle didn’t just tip over under the weight of a lot of magazines.

Inspiration: from Latin America via Treeehugger

Treehugger.com is generally an excellent source of great green ideas and design... here is a fun and inspiring slide show on the creative reuse of common materials - including a button lamp, a number of products made of running shoes (from flower pots to flooring), and a humorous, if not slightly questionable, application of Barbie doll parts.



See the whole slide show by clicking here: Clever and Crazy Recycled Design Ideas from Latin America

Old candles, new fire.

This project was undertaken as part of a one-class assignment in a sculpture course I took a few years ago. The premise was to collect items in one's home, bring them to class, and make something of them within that one class. The result was a class full of "garbage sculptures". It was pretty neat.

I wanted to carve something... I assume that all vegans occasionally long to barbarically hack into something with a blade of some kind. Or maybe I just personally like breaking things. Either way, I looked around my home and office for something to carve. What I found was a bunch of left over candle wax... all different colours and some laced with delicious aromatic oils. I always have a lot of aromatic candles mainly because I have one of the most flatulent dogs on the planet.

I melted all of the lumps of wax together using a double boiler. In the top part of the boiler I placed half of a used orange juice carton, into which I placed the wax to melt. After the wax melted, I let it cool into a solid block, which was easily released from the waxy carton.

The resulting block of wax was reddish brown, with visible ribbons of blue and green. It was very meaty looking, and being a bit of a romantic, I decided to carve a heart - arteries and all.



The process of carving released the aromatic oils trapped in the block. The studio quickly started to smell of chocolate and peppermint. Students and the prof gathered to understand the olfactory nature of my project. I got a very good mark on the project, despite the rudimentary nature of the carving. I believe this is because my teacher could appreciate the delicious process of it's creation.

Currently, I'm collecting another mass of wax to replicate the project. I'm hoping to be able to make a candle and not just a sculpture this time, by including a weighted wick into the container.