News from Red Wicker Bag Design

Exciting news for Red Wicker Bag Design! My journals made from elephant dung paper are now being carried at a Minneapolis shop called Cool Planet Goods, a "green product" store that features crafts made by local artists, as well as green cleaning and bath and body products, energy efficient light bulbs, and even electric bikes. If you are in the Twin Cities area, stop by the shop to check them out! They are located at 1023 Washington Avenue, near the new Guthrie Theater.

If you attended Art-a-Whirl this May, you may have seen me at SIP Coffee Bar at 13th Ave. and Marshall in Northeast Minneapolis, where I was fortunate enough to land a spot right next to the door to sell my Elephant Dung Journals. Very exciting! I passed out a lot of business cards and got a lot of attention just from the "unique" ingredient in these books. The hottest seller that day was my Mini sized journal, which is about 3.5x4 inches. I will definitely be making more of those!

Events coming up...

I hope to pull things together in time to go to the Stone Arch Art Fair this weekend (June 14-15) in Father Hennepin Park (near the Stone Arch Bridge) with my co-worker, Lynn. I unfortunately won't be able to attend, but she will have my journals and business cards set up in her booth.

This event I will definitely be planning ahead for: the Powderhorn Art Fair (August 2-3) in Powderhorn Park, Minneapolis. Again, I will be sharing a booth with my co-worker, Lynn, so keep an eye out for us!

I will also be updating my Etsy shop when I get the new line of Elephant Dung Journals ready, so be sure to check back often! Here's the link: http://redwickerbagdesign.etsy.com

Sustainable Living Challenge

My sister Rachel and I have been working together this year on taking certain steps to make our lives more sustainable, healthier, and happier, and we have been tracking our efforts at our blog called Handcrafts & All Things Green. We have organized our efforts into our very own Sustainable Living Challenge, where we will be challenging ourselves (and our readers) to make more earth-friendly choices in our daily lives. 

Here are the basic goals we have outlined for ourselves under the Sustainable Living Challenge:

1. Be Healthy
   
2. Maintain an Efficient and Sustainable Home
   
3. Benefit the Environment
   
4. Save Money
   
5. Support Community
   
6. Live a Simple and Enjoyable Life
   
7. Encourage and Inspire Others
   

Under each of these goals we will be exploring more specific areas of our lives, and our reports will be given from two very different viewpoints: the Urban Sister (that's me) will compare her sustainable living progress to that of the Small Town Sister (that would be Rachel). Watch for our Sustainable Living Challenge reports (or sign up for email updates at the top of our blog), and feel free to leave us any comments on your own sustainable living progress!

Finally...a sustainable-ready apartment!

For renters, it is sometimes hard to live as sustainably as you would like, since some landlords and apartment buildings aren't very green-living friendly. If you live in an apartment, you don't have a yard - making it difficult to start a compost pile or a garden. If you live in an old building or if your heat is included in the rent, chances are you can't regulate how high the building's heat is turned up in the winter. Many landlords are usually more concerned with the cheapest materials, repairs, or upgrades rather than the most earth-friendly. These obstacles can make green-living, especially in an urban area, frustrating for many and nearly impossible for some.

Having experienced many of these obstacles myself, I am now happy to report that I have found an apartment for my roommate and I that not only encourages sustainable living, but in some cases requires it! (Our lease requires us to recycle all materials accepted by the city.) Our new landlord owns many old houses in the area that he advertises with a sustainable spin, and is slowly upgrading each of them: our building has received new energy-efficient windows, new bamboo flooring, and compact-fluorescent bulbs screwed in by the landlord himself. We will have a compost pile, an herb garden, and a clothesline already in the backyard for our convenience, and we have the go-ahead to plant as many vegetables as we want! The washer and dryer provided in the basement are coin-operated, which will help to discourage electrical clothes-drying. It is located in an area that has almost everything we might need in walking or biking distance - groceries, banks, restaurants, and shops. And finally, we are encouraged to get some fresh air and exercise in the canoe that is provided for all of his tenants! (And since we don't have a TV or air conditioning, we might be looking for some water recreation come summer!)

If only more property managers and landlords were conscience of the environmental impact not only of their own personal lives, but also of the lives of their tenants - which are often influenced by where they are living.

Green architecture.

For any readers out there who have noticed that I haven't been devoting much time lately to my bookbinding, my Etsy shop, and other crafting, I thought I'd give a little update on what I have been doing.

Ever since I graduated with my undergrad degree in architecture last year, I have been working with a small group of friends and fellow architecture graduates on a couple different design projects. We call ourselves the Urbain Collaborative, and we will soon have a website up and running with some more info on our projects. For now, though, it's still under construction. One small project that we have worked on recently was for an international design competition run by Architecture for Humanity, and it was for a new library and community center in the slums of Kenya. So far, our design has made it into the top 20, and we're still waiting to hear about the final results.

The main project that we are continuously working on is for a sustainable mixed-use (commercial + residential) building in Minneapolis located on the Greenway. We have been fortunate enough to be able to work on a project of this size that may actually get built in the next few years, so we are devoting as much of our free time as possible to the design. As recent graduates, we have realized that we will be the future architects of our cities, and that the sustainable design movement is an essential part of our careers and education in the coming years. We are paying especially close attention to this aspect of design in our project, and hope that our building will prove to be an example of affordable and innovative green design.

"Humans are innovators. If we just have the will to say we're going to change what we do fundamentally and we give people the opportunity and the tools to do it, they will step up. We've got to get alignment of the political process and the financial markets to begin to underwrite it, but as soon as it becomes clear that people expect it and want it, I think it's going to change. This is not just a trend of the decade. We're talking about a decades-long effort here ..."

Architect R.K. Stewart, in an interview with Grist.

April snow-shower in the north woods.

This past weekend I was able to get away from the city for a few days and take a trip out to the cabin with a few friends. It was meant to be a "design retreat" weekend, meaning that we shut ourselves indoors all day and get some intensive work done on our design project, free from the distractions of our lives in the city. Nature helped us along this weekend by bringing an unexpected, and most unwelcome, snowstorm on Saturday (and at the end of April!), which effectively kept us holed up inside the entire time. We spent our two days cooking warm meals, brewing coffee, and keeping the wood stove full of happily crackling logs. I did venture outside for a few minutes to snap a few pictures, but I didn't last long. I couldn't resist capturing the scenery coated with a thin layer of snow, the same scenery that I usually only see in the summer when everything is green and fresh.

Green-living.

In starting up an online crafting "business" (and by putting that in parenthesis I only mean that I have not yet reached the "business" level that I would someday like to, and not that I don't view this adventure with wholehearted professionalism), I've realized that it is so much more complicated than I ever thought. One thing that I'm repeatedly going over in my head is how to make a small home-based business "Green". (I know, more parenthesis - it's become such a catch-phrase lately, it almost seems cliche.) But it's not a cliche. It's an important movement that, I believe, is growing a lot more slowly than it needs to.

So how do you run a green home-based business, much less a green home? There are a lot of things to think about. It's nearly impossible to be completely impact-free, but there are a lot of steps we can take to reduce our footprint on the earth. In searching for answers for my many questions on how to live the green life, it has proved difficult to find real-world answers. So one day I tried using one of my favorite features on Etsy: the Forums, were fellow crafters and artists from all over the world can discuss any topic under the sun. I started two different threads in different categories, both under the same name, hoping that this would give my topic the attention it deserved. In the end, I was surprised at the almost overwhelming amount of replies! It made me so happy to see so many others out there thinking about the same things I was, and that I wasn't the only one having a hard time giving up certain bad habits. Now that the posting has died down somewhat, my next step will be to compile all of the green-living tips into blog posts to share with everyone! Keep an eye out for updates!

Here are the links to the threads in the Etsy Forums:
http://www.etsy.com/forums_thread.php?thread_id=5494463
http://www.etsy.com/forums_thread.php?thread_id=5494434

My first commissioned book.

I recently finished my first commissioned book. Click here to see it in my Etsy shop. A friend of mine came to me and asked me to make a custom journal for him, which was exciting for the both of us, since he got to pick out exactly what he wanted it to look like, and I got to work on my first custom design.

I liked the way he put it when we were discussing how a custom journal would inevitably cost more than he would pay if he went to a store and bought a similar book. He told me that he was fine with paying me for doing this for him because otherwise he would just have to go to Barnes & Noble or some other store and give them his money, and he would much rather give that money to me. I'm glad he felt that way, and I wish more people realized that handmade items are well worth the money!