Wednesday, January 21, 2009

YARGH!

That's an ecstatic yawp of excitement, not a frustrated roar.
My brain's afire. I figured out what I want to do with my life, at least over the next few years.
I was just over at my friend Ellen's, and she reminded me about this place in Oakland, The East Bay Depot for Creative Re-Use. I remembered that I had seen that website a long time ago and wished there was something like that around here. Now I know:
I want to have that depot. And I want to have tinkering classes and art classes there, and a store where artists and any uh, just other kind of people, all sorts who might like to build new stuff out of old stuff... and have it all appealingly laid out... I was just reading this Reggio Emilia book about using waste materials for awesome art projects. When it's all separated out, our 'trash' looks SO visually appealing... and doing that with kids, well gee, what an amazing seed to plant in them.
Anyway, maybe I'll even have a fantastic cafe there too, because another dream of mine is to have a perfect coffee shop that is perfectly kid friendly but more than that just has perfect coffee and is fun for anyone, who has kids or not, to come hang out...
Oh this is perfect. Now where will I build my wonderland?
Oh and by the way, check out this website I found! It has multitudes of ideas for reusing everything! And they're actually good ideas, at least some of them are... not some lame thing where you cut the bottom of a soda bottle off and paint it and use it for a soap dish. I'm sorry, but that is a very sorry example of upcycling.

2 comments:

Bernadette said...

I'm envisioning it Kami!!!

Unknown said...

instructables (i'm sure you already know about this) is another good source for upcycling and repurposing. we have a toy shelf for collin that's built out of empty 2.5-gal jugs, and that idea came straight from instructables. we are of a very similar mind on this topic, as you may have already guessed.

-wen