Wednesday, October 20, 2010

New Blog

Hey Everyone! Thanks for following me on this blog this summer. I have now begun a new blog for my Using the Social Web for Social Change course at Bainbridge Graduate Institute called Slow Goods: Movement to Preserve Handmade Products.

See you there! Thanks!

Sunday, October 17, 2010

Vermont Humor: AllCorn Solar Trackers

Scrap Wood Table

My summer internship at Yestermorrow has come to a close. After a fantastic last evening in Vermont with a beautiful Canadian Thanksgiving celebration, I packed my car and left the Mad River Valley. The final week at Yestermorrow was extremely busy as I finished up projects, made some final checks off my list, and started my sustainable business studies again at Bainbridge Graduate Institute.

One of the final projects I worked on was a scrapwood table, which I have been inspired to do from several different existing versions ( here here here.) For a couple weeks I have been collecting pieces of wood from the to-burn pile that range from soft and hardwoods to plywoods. What in my mind seemed like a simple project turned into a complex process of tweaking, gluing, and adjusting pieces with a mallet. A project like this shouldn't have been left to the last week as it left me rushing and lowering my standards!
Final pics of this project and other various projects I have worked on over the course of the summer will be posted later on as I start to photo document my work.

Tuesday, October 5, 2010

Nomadic Design

It was probably the second week I was here at Yestermorrow that I picked up this peculiar book, Nomadic Furniture. Flipping through it, I was instantly entertained: the handwritten pages, the freeflowing thoughts, and the obvious 70's design time stamp. I was reunited with this book during Small Scale Design/Build and thought that it was important to really dive into pages: forward thinking knock-down designs, design on a tight budget, recycling, and adapted modern interpretations of high profile designs. Inspiration is plenty.
The sawhorse leg table was a design consideration for my desk...maybe good workbench legs.
The disposable car seat above is my favorite, hands down. It is such a reflection of the times! Plus that baby looks so happy.

Saturday, October 2, 2010

Corked

After many bottles of wine combined with some resourcefulness and finally the corks have another use. I really like the size and look of the large champagne corks and wanted to keep them intact as much as possible. I decided just to drill a hole into the cork and gluing a strong magnet inside.
I haven't been too impressed with many of the projects out there for use of corks. Of course the ideas haven't been popping (pun intended) into my head in abundance either. I decided to make use of the real cork corks (as opposed to plastic corks) for a trivet for hot plates and pans.
I used a scrap piece of Butternut wood and drilled in 36 shallow holes that the corks could sit in and to remove any gaps the gluing would have left. The wood was finished with linseed oil. I then cut down the lengths of the corks to about half their height (otherwise the trivet would have appeared unstable). I also cut four slivers of cork and placed those underneath the trivet so that the it wouldn't slide around on the table. A little glue and trivet is done!