Liberty Tools, profiled in the video above is a kind of paradise for those who are excited by mysterious, rusty objects, and in the last couple of weeks, I’ve come upon some other, local vendors for tools. If you’re in Adelaide, check out:

Bakker-Burke
49 Torrens Road, Bowden SA 5007
0417 885 571
Mon-Fri 10.00am-5.00pm
A very impressive collection of old farm and shed tools, as well as kitchen utensils. I was particularly delighted by the presence of scythes, sickles and a comprehensive cross-section of egg-beaters.

Cross Road Collectables
441 Cross Road, Edwardstown SA 5039
Mon-Sat 9.00am-5.00pm
Sun 11.00am-3.00pm
Woah. This place is astonishing, with an array of antiques, tools and kitchen utensils overflowing from the shopfront and spreading, tsunami-like, through the house, the backyard, the carport, the shed. If you like mincers as much as I do, then this place is for you, together with vintage beer bottles, old LPs, comics, saws, soldering irons, souvenir beer steins, you name it really.

Stop By Op Shop
Church of the Trinity, 318 Goodwood Road, Clarence Park SA 5034
Tues-Friday 9.30am-3.30pm
Stop By is conveniently located in a cluster of secondhand and antique shops on Goodwood Road, and while it has a modest collection of goodies, the volunteers are delightful and seem determined to extract as little cash as possible from customers. They’ve recently been receiving tools, and local tradies have already started getting in on the action, regularly checking in for $1.00 chisels and more. Also have great kitchenware and oodles of baby gear. The Salvos have a giant shop across the road too.

There are more, and I’ll share any other discoveries as I come upon them – feel free to share some of your own too!

Online film-making community Vimeo regularly sets ‘weekend projects’ for their members. Recently they invited participants to create a 5×5 (a 25-second film made of five 5-second shots) showing aspects of a daily routine. Here’s my attempt, shot on a steamy, brooding Saturday. I realised when I came to editing that I’d been gathering the pattern of events that occur in the lead-up to a downpour, things like frenzied ant activity, gusts of wind and creatures seeking shelter, all while the sky darkens until the rain finally comes.

I’m a long-time admirer of pallets and am regularly delighted by the possibilities they offer for reuse and transformation into other useful objects once their life as a pallet is ended. Likewise, I’m often surprised by the quality of the timber used. I’ve used a red cedar pallet to make a light-weight bike crate, and a couple of years ago used another pallets to bang out an extremely rustic stool. I’ve been pondering some other pallet-based carpentry projects, and have gathered together some inspiration below. It’s especially exciting to see some craftspeople using rough-hewn materials with such elegance. The examples of intelligent reuse are seemingly inexhaustible, so I’ll update this post whenever I have the time and energy!

Chairs

Robust Outdoor Seating from Un Air De Recup

Lovely chair from Upcycle Us (includes basic tutorial)

Armchair from Pierre Vedel

Adirondack Chair from Repurposed Goods (plans available for purchase)

Hanging Seat from Styleitchic

Pallet chairs from Jamison Sellers, with seat and back in pallet timbers, and frame in walnut or pallet

Pallet bench from here

Pallet chair with storage chests/seating from Emotioned.com

Sofas from Styleitchic (includes tutorial)

Armchair from Recyclart

Tables

Beautifully crafted coffee table from Cantilever and Press

Coffee Table from Un Air De Recup

Potting Bench from Better Homes and Gardens

Living, breathing succulent table from Far Out Flora (includes tutorial)

E1221 Table, with stunning pallet timber top, from Jamison Sellers

Coffee Table by Stephane Beauchet

Lo-fi Coffee Table on castors, from Doobi

Shelves and storage

Indoor/outdoor shelving from Un Air De Recup

Kitchen Cabinet from Shabby Love (blog includes tutorial on how to make it)

Kitchen drawers from Shabby Love (blog includes tutorial on how to make it)

Storage chest from the excellent Upcycle Us (includes tutorial)

Shoe rack from Junktion Products

Display

Coat rack from Upcycle Us

Room Dividers from My Friend Staci

Pallet display shelves, from Re and Purposed

Floating pallett shelves from AmandaCarver Designs

Gardening

Vertical Pallet Garden from Life On The Balcony (includes tutorial)

Vertical succulent garden from Design Sponge (includes tutorial)

Vertical succulent garden and screen from Shaynna Blaze (includes tutorial)

Beds

Toddler Bed from Lori Danelle (includes tutorial)

Headboard from Stylizimo

Construction

Flooring from Jetson Green

Made by Hand is a new short film series produced in Brooklyn, New York, celebrating, in the words of the creators, that “which is made locally, sustainably, and with a love for craft.” It’s a thoughtful, beautifully assembled series, the first piece a portrait of Brad Eastabrooke, of Breucklen Distilling Company, and the second, shown above, a piece on writer-turned-artisan-knife-maker Joel Bukiewicz of Cut Brooklyn. The films are inspiring, and offer insights into the nature of craft, the value of objects well made, and the kinds of communities that spring up around and in support of good, honest crafts.

See the full series at Made by Hand.

Sophie's Belleville, with finished crate affixed

Since Sophie purchased her snazzy new bike, a three-speed, step-through ladies’ Trek Belleville, replete with racks on the front and back, she’s been in need of a receptacle to make those racks all the more user-friendly.

This seemed like a perfect opportunity to hone my fledgling carpentry skills as well as implement my passion for upcycling. Some time ago, I’d spied a pallet abandoned outside a shop at the end of our street. The soft, silvery wood looked to me like red cedar, so partner-in-craft Jeremy and I returned later to collect it. Lightweight and easy to work, a bike crate sounded like the perfect use for such fine timber!

A quick glance on Google reveals the many options for bike crate prototypes, as well as the rich variation of fruit crate designs, all of which appear relatively easy to adapt and assemble. Indeed, before embarking on this timber option, I checked to see whether I could simply bolt on a plastic milk crate, but, alas, the rack is too small.

I measured the size of the metal rack first, and decided that the crate should be about 330mm wide, x 280 mm deep and 200 mm high. This seemed modest enough to fit easily in the space required, and also big enough to fit a cake tin, a saucepan, and various other utensils that Soph might like to transport.

I trimmed a piece of plywood (if you’re observant, you can find pallets that are made of plywood, although it might be a bit too heavy-duty for this project) to 300mm x 260mm for the base. I made sure that it was 20mm less on each edge than the total size to allow for the cedar pieces.

A view from the inside, jarrah upright screwed onto base from underneath, and cedar slats screwed into place

The uprights in the corners I made by trimming an old jarrah garden stake into 200mm lengths. I planed these back and then sanded them, and then screwed them firmly in each corner of the plywood base.

Finished corners for the cedar slates, screwed onto the jarrah uprights

I then took my cedar slats and cut them to size – those at the front and back would measure 330mm, while those on the sides would measure 260mm long, allowing the corners to nest together neatly. With a fair amount of sanding and sculpting, I stripped back the silvered layer of the cedar, revealing its rich, reddish grain. I then screwed these in place as shown.

View from beneath: I traced the shape of the metal rack onto the base to determine the location of the bolt holes and any little rubber patches

Finally, I turned over the box, and drew lines to find the centre. Using these lines to position the box, I then traced the metal structure of the rack, indicating where I needed to drill holes to bolt the crate in place. With the rack structure mapped out, I could also identify where to place little squares of rubber to prevent the crate bouncing around on the metal.

Jarrah and cedar, after two coats of timber oil

With a couple of coats of timber oil, the crate was finished ready to be screwed into place!

An Urban Orchard, Part 1/3

Part 2/3

Part 3/3

Enjoy!

Our parent-to-be friends bought a chest freezer to be able to store large amounts of cooked food prior to the baby’s birth. So as a gift idea, we asked guests to the Baby event to bring along a frozen meal to help tide the parents through the crazy months ahead. After all, every parent needs food!

At the event, we set up a craft station where guests could sit and make various kinds of origami animals and nice things out of nice paper (we had books showing how). We also asked people to write messages inside the origami, wishing the baby well. This origami was then constructed into a mobile and given to the parents later which they then strung up above the baby’s bed. Years down the track with the child they will be able to open up all the shapes and read the messages together!

The completed baby mobile

As a gift for the baby, I made a knitted tortoise (my first attempt at stuffed toys!). It seemed a good way of using up lots of small amounts of leftover wool. I found the instructions in a book called “Knitted toys: 25 fresh and fabulous designs” by Zoe Mellor. I did sew on buttons for eyes, then realised buttons are a choking hazard, so I will add felt eyes instead. I really like the idea of making a series of Depression-era toys – toys that don’t require you to go out and buy any items whatsoever, you just use up things you already have – bits of string, cardboard boxes, wood scraps, buttons, fabric or thread. Wool could even be ripped back from an old jumper or something. Joel has a great old black and white family photo of his Dad and uncle as small boys, playing nude in a tiny pool of mud in their backyard with a boat made of wood shards and a leaf sail. Awesome!

The completed knitted tortoise

An experiment in marking time: the year of two houses, two bikes and four pumpkins, illustration by Joel.

Ever since reading Jay Griffith’s book Pip Pip: A Sideways Look at Time, I’ve been fascinated by the extent to which our relationship and understanding of time is culturally constructed. Our system of numbering off the days and years and months and weeks, and splitting the year into four neat quarters bears little relationship to the reality of their origins: the cycles of the moon, the changing of the seasons.

In The Poisonwood Bible, Barbara Kingsolver describes the cultural friction that emerges between the American missionary family and the Congolese villagers over their different conceptions of time. Pivotally, the missionaries experience a great deal of angst around enforcing the idea of “Sunday” in a land without weeks. The family is mortified that the village market is held not on a regular day according to their concept of a seven-day week, but rather on every fifth day. So one week, the market may be on a Friday, according to the Americans’ calendar, but when it next occurs it will be on a Wednesday, then on the Sunday (when the missionaries hope the villagers will instead attend the sermon), then on a Friday again, and so on.

In another book, Forrest Carter’s The Education of Little Tree, I remember how the boy’s Cherokee grandparents keep a ‘marriage stick’. The stick was a treasured object, into which the couple would mark emotionally significant events with notches in the wood. Regardless of whether the events were of great joy or great sadness, each would be marked with a notch. There’s something quite profound about such a deeply personal way of marking the passing of time, where each notch demands a keenness of memory.

Recently, I came across the idea of the ‘Winter Count’, practiced by the Lakota Native American nation. Measuring a year from first snowfall to first snowfall, the Lakota would traditionally keep calendars, using a single image to describe the year. As a both a calendar and a community history, the image for each year would define a significant shared experience for the community, so rather than being numbered off against a historically dubious year zero, years are instead known by such names as “Buffalo belly was plenty”, or “White soldiers make their first appearance in the region”.

Over the years there have been some exciting projects to develop more ecologically grounded conceptions of time. The Ecological Calendar is one North American project that produces frieze-like calendars that draws together a wealth of ecological information for North America, from seasonal happenings to changing patterns of sunlight. Similar projects have been carried out over years by organisations like the Gould League in an effort to build a culture of ecological and landscape awareness. Another great contribution is The Six Seasons Rap, by Melbourne-based singing, dancing, world-changing wunderkind Ilan Abrahams on his album Well. With keen observation skills and a sense of humour, The Six Seasons Rap, celebrates the six traditional seasons of the Yarra watershed and has been on high rotation at our house.

There’s lots more – the Celtic or pagan calendar, for example, offers one European-based model of marking time in a way that is tied to ecological and astronomical phenomena. When inverted for the southern hemisphere is works for marking certain significant seasonal changes. Combined with the  depth of ecological knowledge embodied in the seasonal calendars of indigenous nations all over the continent, perhaps there are the roots for a calendar that acknowledges the unique capacities and patterns of our distinct bioregions as well as the cultural diversity present within them. A sense of time, it appears, is deeply linked to a sense of place, and perhaps like so many other things, time too, needs to become more local in the emergence of a sustainable culture.

In this spirit, I’ve been tooling around with creating a different kind of calendar to celebrate the passing of each year. Partly by coincidence and partly by design, I’ve produced my first one as the cold months kick in. So there it is: the year of two houses, two bikes and four pumpkins.

New and creative approaches to growing food are germinating in communities all over the world. These approaches demonstrate that the benefits of sustainable food growing can reach far beyond the act of gardening. Some build community or aim to improve health, while others address issues of food security or offer strategies for building sustainable local economies, and some are a combination of all of these. In many cities, grassroots food projects are strengthened by the support of visionary local governments.

Many important community food initiatives, like food co-ops, farmers’ markets, community-supported agriculture and school and community gardens are now familiar and are established as important components of the movement for local, community-based food. However in backyards and street-corners other, sometimes less visible, strategies are also contributing to the transformation of our cities.

Backyard-sharing, permablitzes and the Magic Harvest
Backyard-sharing links those who no longer have the ability or time to maintain their yard with those who don’t have the space, but have the enthusiasm for growing food. In Adelaide, community group Sustainable Communities SA coordinates seven shared backyards in the eastern suburbs. Shared backyards offer a mutual benefit: sharing backyards allow residents who may have limited physical abilities to remain in their homes, while providing regular social contact and fresh produce, while the share-gardeners are provided with an opportunity to get in touch with the earth, to grow their own food and to participate in community. This process of connecting those with land to those with enthusiasm for gardening is formalised through projects like Landshare, an online network currently emerging here in Australia.

Through collaboration between tenants, designers and community, permablitzes transform conventional backyards into productive permaculture paradises over the course of a day. Volunteers are recruited to help out, and tasks are structured as workshops so participants learn valuable skills for application in their own yards. While initially emerging out of Melbourne, most cities around Australia now boast permablitz networks.

The idea that food security begins at home, and is nested within community, is highlighted by The Magic Harvest project, an initiative supported by the City of Onkaparinga in southern Adelaide. Inspired by Lolo Houbein’s book One Magic Square, Magic Harvest supports families in disadvantaged neighbourhoods to grow food on their backyards. It provides soil, seedlings and regular training and support, and emphasises growing food that the gardeners actually eat and enjoy. As the project grows, these initial households are intended to become community hubs for food growing, from which their neighbours and other community members can learn skills for producing and preparing food.

Guerrilla Gardening and public plantings
Guerrilla gardening suggests a more underground(!) approach to making urban space edible. Food gardeners covertly plant out public land with edible plants both as a political statement and a strategy for urban food production. In Adelaide, guerrilla gardeners have been active in the south-western corner of the city in recent years, with their exploits planting fruit trees and vegetables in city squares, parklands and vacant lots rating an appearance of ABC’s Stateline.

However the value of food growing in public places is increasingly recognised by some city councils. In the Sydney suburb of Chippendale, residents have transformed their local streets with council support. Concrete has been removed, nature strips and verges planted out with food plants, and compost bins located on street corners, and a local park has been planted with espaliered fruit trees. In the UK town of Totnes, a centre of the Transition movement, residents have been planting nut trees in public places since 2007 with enthusiastic support from the local council. On a broader scale, “Incredible Edible” Todmorden, also in the UK, has food plants growing everywhere from railway stations to carparks.

A more formal approach than planting out the nature strip, community orchards are another expression of the community garden concept, where public space is planted out with community-managed fruit trees. In addition to an abundance of fresh fruit, community orchards provide verdant public space and a venue for the sharing of the skills of cultivation and preservation. Many community orchards work to ensure the preservation of heirloom fruit varieties that have long disappeared from supermarket shelves.

In recent years political figures from the Queen to Kevin Rudd have been demonstrating another kind of public planting by installing vegie patches to meet their household needs. Likewise, some city councils have developed civic gardens on public land to supply the needs of their citizens. For example, the Victory Garden installed outside San Francisco City Hall in 2008, provided a weekly harvest to local foodbanks to help feed the city’s hungry. In Canada, the City of Vancouver established and maintains the City Farmer Compost Demonstration Garden. Funded and staffed by the city, it demonstrates sustainable gardening techniques and technologies to Vancouver residents, complete with an outdoor classroom for local schools and a compost emergency hotline. Characteristically, Vancouver recently declared that it would be the greenest city on the planet by 2020, and has acknowledged local food as central to this aim.

Urban farms and food policy
Small Plot Intensive (SPIN) Farming offers a strategy for gardeners to grow food commercially in the city, not on one massive broadacre plot, but rather sprinkled over numerous small plots, from big backyards to vacant land, through formal agreements with property owners. This innovative approach, now relatively widespread across North America, indicates the potential for urban food growing to genuinely support sustainable livelihoods and local economies.

The link between urban food growing and broader contributions to economy and livelihoods is strengthened by progressive approaches to policy on the part of local governments. Seattle City Council declared 2010 the “Year of Urban Agriculture”, and proceeded to pass a swag of legislation in support of urban farming. While the legislation covered a gamut of issues, centrally it officially recognised urban farming as a legitimate land use. Since the passing of these laws, the city has experience a surge of urban food growing, from backyard vegie patches to commercial market gardens springing up on vacant land. Also in the US, San Francisco recently mandated actions for the council to increase urban food production. Among a variety of strategies, all city agencies are now auditing the land they administer for food production potential, and all city events now source local, sustainably-produced food where possible. Seeking to become the “Greenest City in America” the City of Philadelphia has established an Urban Farming Incubator as part of its commitment to urban agriculture. Incubators provide large scale plots of urban land for emerging urban farmers to commercially cultivate organic food with the support of non-government organisations, educational institutions and local government. Incubator participants sell their produce at local farmers’ markets as they develop their urban farming enterprise. Once the farmers are qualified, they move into independent urban farming, and their incubator plot becomes available for other aspiring urban food producers.

Food Policy Councils offer a collaborative model for uniting council, industry and community to explore ways to cultivate sustainable food systems. Policy councils now exist in cities all over the world, and through food charters commit the city council to supporting sustainable, local, health and culturally appropriate food for its citizens.

Urban, community-based food growing is increasingly recognised not just for its health and environmental benefits, but also for its ability to cultivate food security, meaningful employment and sustainable local economies. In the familiar acts of gardening and sharing food with neighbours and friends, both established and emerging food initiatives highlight that, in the words of Bill Mollison, “while the problems of the world are increasingly complex, the solutions are embarrassingly simple”.

The "Liberator" Compressed Earth Brick Press, designed by Open Source Ecology. Courtesy of Open Source Ecology

In the middle of rural Missouri there is a physicist-turned-farmer looking to redefine the way we build the world. Marcin Jakubowski is the mastermind behind a group of DIY enthusiasts known as Open Source Ecology and their main project, the Global Village Construction Set. The network of engineers, tinkerers, and farmers is working to fabricate 50 different low-cost industrial machines. A complete set, they say, would be capable of supporting a sustainable manufacturing and farming community of about 200 people almost anywhere across the globe—a “small-scale civilization with modern comforts.”

The organization’s final goal? According to the “vision statement” on the group’s website, “A world where every community has access to an open source Fab[rication] Lab which can produce all the things that one currently finds at a Walmart cost-effectively, quickly, on demand from local resources.”

All of the machines, from the tractors to the laser cutter to the backhoe to the cement mixer, are designed to be modular, require only one engine, and be built with interchangeable parts so that a single machine can perform multiple functions. The machine that clears the land for the foundation of a building, for example, can then be reconfigured to pulverize the cleared soil into uniform pieces just under a centimeter in size. The same machine is then retooled again to transform that soil into bricks. To date, Open Source Ecology has built prototypes of eight of the 50 machines, and it has finalized the design of the brick-maker (a.k.a. the “Liberator” Compressed Earth Brick Press).

But there’s more. The communities Jakubowski is hoping to build will all be sustainable, energy-efficient, and off-grid. Additionally, as the name of his organization implies, all of his designs are open-source, available to anyone with an Internet connection and basic welding skills. As Jakubowski himself admitted last month during his presentation as a TED Fellow in Long Beach, California, it’s “a very big, hairy, audacious goal” to seek to build and distribute the plans for all 50 of the machines. Oh, and he hopes to finish the bulk of the designing by the end of 2012.

“Marcin is a mad scientist,” says Severine von Tscharner Fleming, a farmer in New York’s Hudson Valley who also promotes the open-sourcing of agricultural and rural hardware. In fact, although Open Source Ecology’s project is called the Global Village Construction Set, indicating an international focus, domestic farmers might be its most receptive audience. Currently, many American farmers tackling small acreages are making do with 1940s-era tractors and other solidly built but outdated equipment. Jakubowski’s self-fabricated tractors and backhoes may provide one of the only affordable alternatives for start-up farmers looking for small-scale machinery.

That appeal is one reason Open Source Ecology’s followers have recently been growing in number. In addition to the collaborators who convene at Jakubowski’s 30 acres in Missouri, donors numbering in the “upper hundreds” are offering varying levels of financial support, according to Julia Valentine, a long-time activist who recently joined the group to do outreach and fundraising. And small groups in Oberlin, Ohio; Eastern Pennsylvania; New York; and California have started getting involved by helping develop blueprints and by building prototypes.

Although the Global Village Construction Set is ambitious in scope and attempts to create open-source blueprints where previously only proprietary information existed, its concepts aren’t entirely new. As Valentine points out, “Every single one of [the machines] already exist in real life. It’s not reinventing the wheel; it’s open-sourcing the wheel. All of these technologies have been proven.”

That comes as a relief to Mireille Cronin Mather, executive director of the Foundation for Sustainable Development, which potentially could use some of Open Source Ecology’s blueprints and machines in the projects related to health, environmental sustainability, and economic development that it pursues throughout the developing world. Having worked in Africa and India, among other places, Mather says she has observed many high-concept projects prove unrealistic on the ground. “I’ve seen very, very well-meaning ‘appropriate technology’ projects just lying unused because the sustainability aspects aren’t all the way thought through,” she says.

One short-term stumbling block for Open Source Ecology, however, may turn out to be the more mundane, less revolutionary aspect of maintaining organizational momentum. That is, continuing to grow its ranks and develop cohesive support and funding. That will be key if the group intends to reach its goal of completing the design of the remaining 49 machines and raising the $2.4 million needed to do so by the end of 2012. “We haven’t really formed up some of this business part of it,” Valentine says.

So far most of the money coming in has been in the form of small, individual, recurring donations. Venture capital is an unlikely source of future funding since there’s not expected to be any return on investment. But that hasn’t stopped the small groups in Ohio, Pennsylvania, and elsewhere from helping out, which Valentine says is the only way Open Source Ecology will be able to finalize 49 more machines in 21 months.

The partners from Ohio, based at the New Agrarian Center in Oberlin, are testing blueprints for the Compressed Earth Brick kit. They’ve drawn up plans for a large storage center for their Community Supported Agriculture project and a “mushroom chamber” for cultivating fungi, and they are trying to use Jakubowski’s blueprints to build the compressed earth brick machine to produce the bricks needed for the building. “We love the concept of what he’s doing,” says Sandy Kish-Jordan, the director of the center. “We loved the concept, but also the notion of collaboratively creating something that can provide a purpose in our community, and at a reasonable cost.”