What to do with your old helmet.

an old roller derby helmet makes an excellent hanging basket for spring flowers

(for those of you who didn't get the #7734 before, I hope it's obvious now)

In any sport where hitting your head is such a risk that wearing a helmet is either a rule or generally advisable, you occasionally have to replace them. Any time you take a major blow to your helmet, it becomes is compromised in that area and may merit replacement (learn more about single v. multiple impact helmets here). As a result of several years playing derby, I have amassed a few of these and I just can't throw them out, as I feel there is too much useful material still intact. 

This year I have decided to make a few hanging flower baskets out of them - as demonstrated in the above photo. I lined them with an old plastic bag and then poked some holes in the bag through the helmet vent to allow for drainage - filled them with dirt and seeds and that's it. 

How to tie a bow tie (or: welcome to adulthood, learn a new knot)

OK. Bow ties are back in (sort of), I get it. But what is with the clip-ons? Why is it that we draw the line of learning fashion knots with the Double Windsor? Learning new things can be fun and - with the internet - so easy!

I don't want to hear "I don't know how to tie a bow tie" as an excuse to not wear proper adult attire. If you didn't know how to tie a standard neck tie, would you just give up and shop in the children's department for a clip-on? No, you would learn the old fashioned way, from your dad, girlfriend or some other source of such wisdom. As such, clip-ons are relegated to kids, who have yet to be educated on the proper technique of tying a safe knot around their own necks.

So why is the bow tie any different? It's just a blinking knot. If you couldn't learn a simple knot, you'd still be in Velcro sneakers - so you are capable of doing this. I have faith in you.

As always, if Google knows how to tie a bow tie, you know how to tie a bow tie. Problem solved.

I can hear it now: "but - I don't have a self-tying bow tie." Well you didn't have a clip-on before you bought it either, so smarten up and start shopping where people assume you have half a brain. I'm a fan of etsy for these sorts of things, as I could care less about brand names, don't like the sideways glances of sales people as a woman who shops in the "mens" department and also have a serious soft-spot for handcrafted accoutrement. I have bought several bow ties from xoelle - and would recommend that shop highly, as they used recycled fabrics (old ties, shirts etc.) and can even take your old neck ties and turn them into bow ties. I've recycled two old silk ties that were a little worse for wear and now they look fabulous - as will I, every time that I wear them. 

So there you have it - all you need to know to enter the world of the adult consumer of ties. Maybe later we'll talk ascots, as I'm starting to see those pop up in the queer community. That means it's only a matter of time to see them popping up in hipster bars and straight clubs.

n.b. Don't ever be caught in public by a very talented photographer wearing a clip-on tie if you are going to be commenting on the dubious nature of said item. Unless, of course, this is some kind of ridiculous child-like costume for a flamboyant parade - then, at least, you would have some kind of lame excuse for this mildly public contradiction.

Converting Plastics into Oil

More on the theme of energy being everywhere, and in keeping with Braungart and McDonough's Cradle to Cradle, "Waste = Food" concept, below is a short presentation featuring Akinori Ito of Blest Co, a Japanese company that has developed a machine that is able to convert plastics back to fuel oil.

More details on the concept can be found at the World 2.0 website.

Make your own eco-notebooks.

Like a lot of visual learners, I have to write everything down in order to remember them - I write words, pictures and anything that might help me commit certain kinds of ideas to memory. I began studying for the GRE recently and am thereby forcing myself to revisit the high school math that, despite it's purported importance at the time, seems to have been underutilized in my academic and professional life. I forget most of it completely, while the echoes of some rules of logic seem to be trapped in the folds of my grey-matter and tease me continually by their inaccessible presence. So I take notes. I draw pictures. I procrastinate.

While looking for an excuse not to start an algebra review, it occurred to me I might be better able to use the scrap paper I had been using for notes. So I got out my cutting board and hacked a substantial stack of old lecture notes in two.

I then used the three-hole punch to make a few holes on one side. I found an old pasta box in the recycling and cut that to make a front and back to the book, and I bound all the stuff together with a few hinged metal book rings. I'd advise the use of some heavier cardboard stock, but otherwise it's functional, mostly recycled and took no time at all. Sure beats buying a recycled paper "eco-notebook" with a plastic cover in the stores.

Boozer Bookshelf

I've been collecting wine bottles - attempting occasionally - mostly unsuccessfully - to make drinking glasses out of them. I had a few of these blue Aufkellerein bottles kicking around when the need for more book storage became evident.

After a visit to Instructables.com I found a great idea for this little boozy bookshelf project. And voila - an afternoon, several nights of drinking white wine in the park with my sweetheart, and a trip to the hardware store later: a lovely little place to house the children of my Amazon.ca addiction.

More cool recycling ideas from Montreal coffee shops...

I love glass walls - but they are so blinking expensive. Unless, of course you run a coffee shop with an alcohol licence and a clientele that has a taste for Moosehead. Check out this great glass wall at Le Caffè Mariani (4450 Notre-Dame ouest - in St. Henri)

The two sides of the glass wall - stacked Moosehead bottles, stuck together and encased in a thick welded metal frame.

EcoBooth design facilitation follow-up.

Photo from M. Bernier

In February, I was fortunate enough to act as the facilitator for a green building charette at École Polytechnique de Montréal.  Clearly the students got busy shortly thereafter - because by the end of the semester, they had a completed building on their campus. Defying at least part of the cardinal law of real estate development - thou shall double your budget and timeline in half the time planned - they put this little gem together in no time (e.g. about two months from our meeting in February). No word on the budget - but there appear to be many sponsors for the whole project, so I hope that means this little project won't be haunting departmental budgetary meetings for too long.  

The challenge was to design, develop and build a booth for a parking lot attendant that a) does not have to be connected to an energy grid; b) must be thermally comfortable for the occupant; c) while not occupied the internal temperature must stay between 0 and 40°C; and all while being d) collapsible and transportable. No small feat, for a little building. 

What they developed is called S.P.A.R.K. - or Solar Powered Autonomous Renewable Energy Kabin - if you want to get all technical. Engineering students and their clever branding! As you can see from the picture, the booth is powered by three 210w Kyocera solar panels, which have been paired with 6 batteries, to allow for energy storage. The wee building will produce 645 kWh annual and is able to store 8.3 kWh.

The students investigated three separate envelop designs and compared their cycle of life impacts on the environment, before choosing to compose the walls of Roxul R22, Enermax pannels and MDF, the ceiling of Pare-air Tyvek, Celfort 300, MDF, and the floor of fibre cement board. The generous fenestration is triple glazed, and allows for substantial solar gains.  

What an awesome project! Congrats to Prof. Bernier for offering his students this practical learning experience and here is hoping they have many green buildings in their futures. 

Oh hello blog. It's you again.

Yep, like most bloggers on occasion... I fell off the bandwagon in terms of writing. I'm fine with it. Life's like that. I've been playing a crazy amount of derby in other cities and have been loving every moment of it - something has got to give, and it's not going to be work or derby.

Besides writing another thing I haven't been doing very much of is reading for pleasure. However, I did manage to pick up a copy of Dan Pink's A Whole New Mind: Why Right-Brainers Will Rule the Future while wondering JFK a few weeks ago, and plowed through it on the flight home. I like a writer that theorizes and then gives you the opportunity to put some ideas to practice, and Pink does just that by providing the reader with a goodly number of exercises that one can undertake in order to better get in touch with the creative brain. One such exercise is to maintain a design journal, where you can note (in writing or in images) both good and bad design - in an effort to encourage a higher level of design consciousness within the practitioner. While I would suggest I'm often excited by good design, I must honestly say that I spend more time being critical of bad design and now I have an excuse to compile the two and see if I can learn something in the process. Or at least have a good coffee in the process - which is what happened today:

L'Emporte-Pièce is a new restaurant in the Plateau. It's tiny, really cute and the gentleman behind the counter can make a mean soy-latte. You should go and check it out. And pay attention to the chairs - if you are a fan of the STM you may recognize them - they are old bus seats. The guy behind the counter, presumably the owner (or one thereof), said he bought them from the STM for a steal and refashioned them into seats of the shop. Clever man. They are super durable and look great in the eclectic design of the shop, which seems to be heavily reliant of the clever re-use of a old objects and materials. The coffee appears to be all new though, so don't worry about that.  

Awesome re-use of STM chairs at L'Emporte-Pièce.

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.

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.

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.