National Consignment Day Event At The RealReal

Today is National Consignment Day and you can celebrate with The RealReal by attending a sustainability workshop at one of their brick and mortar locations. Click here to lean more.

Recycled Stuff You’d Actually Want To Buy

‘Fresh Morning’
Recycled Paper Dangle Earrings

I’ve been wanting for a while to do a post about recycled things that are attractive. So many recycled products are not very pretty and, although we may want to buy them to support companies or artists who use recycled products we don’t buy them because we don’t actually like them.

So, here are some products made with recycled materials that, at least in the eye of this beholder, are esthetically pleasing.

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The Stone Zealot

I don’t know how many of you have read my About Me page, but on that page I describe myself as a ‘lover of all things stone.’ I love the look of stone and the feel of stone; I love prepping the site to lay stone or to build a stone wall. Stone is hard but malleable. It can look old and new; beautiful, rough, sleek and ancient all at the same time if worked by the right hands.

Casey Lynch and his brother Nate have built some very impressive stone walls through their landscaping firm Special Additions Landscaping. They also have a blog called thegardenzealot.com. When I happened across it, I found myself taking more than a few minutes to admire their work.

The wall above was built completely with found stone in Otis Orchards, WA and features a flower design in the center. It is a dry stack wall meaning no mortar was used. Instead it was built by meticulously finding the right stones for the right spaces and putting one on top of the other until a sound structure emerged.

The image below features three raised bed gardens, two stone and one cedar. The post  on thegardenzealot.com with information on these beds also has a link to a chart on Urban Garden Solutions that shows you how much more you can grow in the same amount of space in a raised bed.

Take a look at the Special Additions Landscaping web site for more beautiful landscapes Casey and Nate have built.

Also look out for their print magazine titled The Garden Zealot coming soon.

The Pomegranate Center and The Sumner Alley

A special thank you to Tim Matsui for letting us use his photographs in this post.

My school, Colby College, had Jan Plan. Jan Plan was great. For one month in between semesters you could do just about anything you wanted as long as you learned something. You could take a class somewhere else, learn to play the guitar, or go on a school-sponsored trip to London to study theater.

One year I went on an Earthwatch trip to Montserrat in the West Indies. Originally it was supposed to be an architectural dig but hurricane Hugo put the kibosh on that, so Earthwatch turned the trip into a hurricane relief project and asked all who had signed up if we still wanted to go. We all did.

In the main town of Montserrat, Plymouth, there had been a very old tree that marked the unofficial town gathering spot. People would meet there during the day as they went along their daily routines and at night to socialize.

The hurricane demolished the tree but people still gathered around the spot where it had been. To them this was a social routine that was not going to end because the tree was gone.

The Pomegranate Center, founded in 1986 by artist and community organizer Milenko Matanovic, is dedicated to working with communities to create public gathering places. The people of the Pomegranate Center believe their, “… time tested approach to public space building creates a foundation for healthy community development and can be a critical first step in bringing communities together to work for a healthier, more sustainable future.”

Recently the Pomegranate center completed a project in Sumner, WA that turned an alleyway into a community space.

To the left is a picture of the alley before any work was done. Not very inviting or practical as a community space.

But with hard work from Pomegranate staff members and the community this alley was transformed into the beautiful space you see below.

But with hard work from Pomegranate staff members and the community this alley was transformed into the beautiful space you see here.