Some of you may know that besides my work at Green Renters, I have my own small craft business where I make items from vintage and reclaimed materials. So I was excited to receive a copy of Big Green Book of Recycled Crafts ( Leisure Arts #4802) (Perfect Paperback).

It details a wide range of recycle craft tutorials including textiles and reusing plastic. I particularly liked the tutorials for the wine cork pin board and patchwork blankets.

It’s a book that would be useful perhaps for a school or those new to recycled crafts

To win: Simply sign up to our monthly Green Renters newsletter! Just add your details to the sign up box to the left of the page. We won’t spam you, send you five million irrelevant emails or pass on your details to anyone else!

If you’re already a subscriber please leave a comment below this post.

This competition is now closed, congratulations to the winner : Chrissy Foreman Cranitch

Screw Light bulbs
Donna Green and Liz Minchin
ISBN 9781742580685
AUD$32.95

Attempting to navigate through the myriad of facts and figures pertaining to what is causing and what can be done about climate change is a business fraught with confusion, pitfalls and frustration.

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Some of you may know that besides my work at Green Renters, I have my own small craft business where I make items from vintage and reclaimed materials. So I was excited to recieve a copy of Big Green Book of Recycled Crafts ( Leisure Arts #4802) (Perfect Paperback).

(more…)

I was intrigued to hear about a book where the author (artist and writer Kate Bingham Burt) undertakes to document through drawing her daily purchases over a three year period. Obsessive Compulsion has only been recently published. I’ve not found a copy of the book yet, but Amazon states:

Our daily lives are filled with consumption—$1.50 for a cup of coffee, $5.95 for a magazine, $17.99 for headphones, $1.79 for cough drops, $36.00 for a haircut. Whether bought out of necessity or indulgence, purchased alone or in a group, everything we buy has its own story to tell. We buy art supplies while feeling inspired, CDs while shopping with friends, and a new pair of jeans to give us a lift when we are feeling blue. Yet, these powerfully emotional experiences can be fleeting—quickly erased by the pull of the next ‘must-have’ acquisition. In Obsessive Consumption, Portland-based artist Kate Bingaman-Burt holds up a mirror to her own obsession with shopping and acquisition. Faced with a mounting pile of postgraduation credit card debt, Bingaman-Burt concocted a unique artistic response to this all-too-common dilemma. She picked up a pen and began drawing her monthly credit card statements, painstakingly recreating every last ledger line and decimal point, vowing to continue serving her artistic penance until her debt was repaid. As a relief from this project—turning the idea of ‘retail therapy’ on its ear—Bingaman-Burt began drawing one of her purchases from each day, losing herself in the items, patterns, simple lines, and typography.

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Over the next few weeks, here at Green Renters we will be taking a look at:

Handmade and homemade gift  giving

Shopping locally and Ethically

Eco friendly Christmas decorations

Christmas wrapping the green way

Dealing with non ‘green’ relatives

Preserving your plants whilst you are away…

Also we will be having a very special giveaway next week!

Stay tuned for more details!

Fermenting Revolution (How to drink beer and save the world)
Christopher Mark O’Brien

I love Beer for many reasons, but especially because I love the way I can travel around the world and try a completely different brew in every town that I wont find elsewhere. It seems that Christopher Mark O’Brien is one man who loves beer as much as I do, in fact, quite possibly, a lot more than I do

This book is an enthusiastically written documentation all about beer, it’s History, it’s culture, it’s health benefits, it’s present, it’s future and how so many small breweries across the world are helping their community and the world.

The Author’s sheer passion for his subject is hard to dislike and I found myself tearing through this book in rapid time, enjoying every moment and discovering many fascinating nuggets of information.

For example did you know that beer has been around for an incredibly long time and was created as a palatable substitute for water, not only that, but drinking quality (i.e. fairly naturally made) beer in moderation is pretty good for you, containing many beneficial nutrients. Also, that until the industrial revolution, beer was generally brewed by small local breweries and by women, in fact for a substance that is more recently associated with men, it’s past is most definitely feminine.

Now that microbreweries are rapidly cropping up around the world and are experiencing great and deserved success, it’s refreshing and illuminating to read about so many of them following strict environmental practices and bringing the wonders of beer drinking firmly back into the friendly, sociable, community bonding activity it always was until it’s recent corruption into a bland mainstream fuel for macho violence.

Available in Australia from Foot Print books