Stash Busting Instrument Case

20 May

Destash Bash

For my first Destash Bash project I wanted to make a case for the guitalele I acquired as a backpacking guitar. Most of the materials, with the exception of the Ridge Rest that I used for padding, came from my stash and were bought when I got the instrument a few months ago.

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I started out with the intention of turning this blog post into a tutorial, but I gave up when I realized that my original scheme wasn’t all that well planned. Although it worked out in the end, I had to do a lot of hand sewing, and there is one part that came out a little bit wonky. You may have more luck getting sewing advice from a brain dead parakeet than trying to copy my method. You could try one of these tutorials instead: Instructables, Ehow.

Things I learned from this project:

1. Guitaleles > Backpacking Guitars. The used Guitalele I found was cheaper, lighter, and more compact than any of the backpacking guitars I looked at.

2. Social media can be a useful tool in helping you find reusable materials. Mara (yes, that Mara) came through for me by digging an old beat up foam sleeping mat out of the trunk of her Falcon after I put a request for one on facebook. She warned me that it might not be in great shape, and it did take a bit of scrubbing to get it clean but it was perfect for my project, and I didn’t have to buy a new one.

3. DO NOT attempt to make a case for an instrument because you think it will be more fun than just buying one online. Yes, the finished product will be a million times cooler than anything you can find on Ebay. But making a guitar case is surprisingly difficult.

4. Foam sleeping pads may be a great and versatile material for construction, (and my parents said I would never learn anything useful from playing Dagorhir in college.) However, trying to ease thick foam around a sewing machine foot is just about impossible. Hence all the hand sewing and cussing.

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5. I used clearance dress lining fabric for the inside of the case. I thought the light weight, slippery fabric would be the best choice for the lining. In retrospect I think any woven fabric would have been fine. The lining fabric was full of static, unravelled like crazy, and was an all around pain to work with. It also felt so unpleasant on my skin that I shudder just thinking about wearing it as an actual dress lining.

6. Remember to sew the straps on before you assemble the whole thing. This will make your life 800 times easier.

7. The case isn’t waterproof so I have to wrap the guitalele in a large trash bag to make sure that it stays dry in the rain.

8. I still hate zippers. I wound up sewing the whole thing in by hand, but the moment I finally zippped my guitalele into its own custom case was pretty satisfying.

Materials used:

Outdoor upholstery Fabric (stash)
Lining fabric (stash)
Robe Zipper (stash)
Webbing (stash)
Thread (stash)
Duct Tape (stash)
Ridge Rest (reused!)

Despite all the difficulty I had, I am pretty happy with how it turned out. I do have to be careful about how I set my backpack down when I have the Guitalele strapped onto it, but so far it’s worked really well.

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The completed case in action on the Panorama Trail.

~Robin

Giveaway Day Winner!

17 May

Destash Bash

Dear Blog,

I’m not sure what happened to April. I’m hoping that the idea of not being able to buy craft supplies until December didn’t send her over the deep end and cause her to fake her own death thus enabling her to buy craft supplies whenever she wants. During my search for her I did find this unpublished blog post sitting in our queue. If you notice a tall girl cataloging the books at Joann’s and get the suspicious feeling that she might be living there please let me know immediately.

~Robin

I’m a day late (please don’t ban me Sew Mama Sew), but I’m here to announce the winner for our Sew Mama Sew giveaway.  Without further ado:

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I’d like to congratulate Cons on winning the Tom’s wallet.  I’ll email you and get that out by the 15th!

I had a great time looking at all the giveaways and finding new blogs to follow.  Thanks to all of you for participating and I hope you check back with us soon.

~ April

Death Valley Flashback

10 May

If you’re looking for Sew Mama Sew giveaway, go here.

In all the hullabaloo of Earth Day, I didn’t get a chance to talk about an awesome trip I took at the beginning of the month.  Our new boss gave us a few extra days off before Easter and it was the perfect time of year for a trip to the desert.

When I was in elementary school, I was entranced by the idea of two national parks: Petrified Forest and Death Valley.  For a kid growing up in Ohio where everything is either green or covered in snow,  dry, desolate places captured my imagination.  I was sadly disappointed when I visited Petrified Forest in my mid-twenties.  My 10-year-old mind had imagined it to be a full-on forest, just made of stone.  Instead, I was treated to a desert with some rocky looking things lying around.  I haven’t been back since, so I in no way hold to that opinion.  I hated Joshua Tree the first time I went, too (going in July will do that to you).  Death Valley was a much more fulfilling experience.

So, first thing we should all know is that a scene or two in Star Wars was filmed in good old Death Valley. Remember Mos Eisley?

Wretched hive of scum and villainy. (Photo from Star Wars Wikia)

That’s Dante’s View – my first view of the valley.

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There’s other canyons that we visited that feature in Star Wars as well, but I won’t get into that too far. If you’re into it, my boyfriend talks about it in his podcast. The Death Valley part starts at about 1 hour and 13 minutes. If you just want to see the Star Wars comparison shots, skip ahead to 1 hour and 22 minutes.

What surprised me most about Death Valley was its diversity.  I was expecting long stretches of scrub brush and dirt broken up by the occasional cattle skulls and cacti.  Unlike the Petrified Forest, my dashed exceptions were welcome.  Among the gems of the park were an array of canyons with names like Golden, Mosaic, Desolation, and… Titus.

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The aptly named Mosaic Canyon was my favorite.  The walls are worn smooth from rushing water, revealing layers of rock compacted together, looking quite like a mosaic.  There were even a few chuckwallas enjoying the shade from the canyon walls.

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Death Valley is known for being “Hottest, Driest, Lowest” and rightly so.  Even at the end of March, when it was still snowing in Ohio, temperatures were in the mid-nineties.  The park doesn’t recommend visiting between April and October since temperatures rise even higher.  In fact, the highest temperature on the planet was recorded in Furnace Creek – 134°.

Death Valley is also the lowest place in the United States.  When you drive down to Badwater (or, if you’re adventurous, rent a bike), you’re descending to 282 feet below sea level.

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Despite the heat, the landscape looks arctic.  Although the stretch of white crystals is convincing enough to pass for snow, it’s actually salt leftover from evaporated water.

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Back at elevation (of just about sea level), another area of the park leads you straight into the Sahara.

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The only dunes I’d seen before this were the ones in North Carolina and at Pismo Beach.  The Mesquite Flat Sand Dunes were something entirely different.   They just appear amongst the typical desert scrub, like someone just swept all the loose sand into one place.

If you want to stay in Death Valley and don’t have a camper, I’d suggest taking our route.  We stayed up at Mesquite Springs campground.  While it’s a bit out of the way (you’ll have to drive about 40 minutes or so to get into the Stovepipe Wells and Furnace Creek areas of the park), it’s also at 1800 feet, making it about 20° cooler than the valley floor.  When you’re enjoying the pleasantly warm rather than unbearably hot evenings, the drive feels worth it.  Besides, we got to share our campsite with some very enthusiastic bats.

As Death Valley is the largest National Park in the lower 48 states, it’s impossible to see everything in a few days.  A lot of the park is only accessible by off-road vehicles.  The dunes we saw were about 100 ft tall.  If you have an off-road vehicle, you can see dunes that rise 700 ft, making them the tallest in California.  Next visit will definitely involve some of the sites that are farther afoot.

~April

Destash Bash and Giveaway Day

6 May

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If you’re looking for the Sew Mama Sew Giveway, you’re in the right place, but we’d love it if you took a few minutes to read about our new project before entering!

During our 30 days of Earth Day celebration I started to feel a little bit guilty. It started when I used a water footprint calculator to figure out how much water my stuff uses. It grew when April wrote about being a conscience consumer. It escalated as I wrote about reducing how much we buy. It reached DEFCON 1 when April posted about green crafting projects.

Like most of the crafters out there, I have a ton of craft stuff. I am proud of my ability to make things that are practical and look great. I look forward to the time that I have to craft, and I love surfing the internet or cruising the aisles of fabric stores looking for inspiration.

Many crafters joke about stash acquisition beyond life expectancy. Some of us go on yarn diets, but we always seem to give ourselves all sorts of outs. (Sock yarn doesn’t count! I can only buy fabric once a month! Days that end with “Y” are fair game!) I suspect there are a lot of reasons for this, yet among a large portion of the crafting community there seems to be this attitude that rampant consumerism doesn’t count if it’s for crafting. It’s a bit ironic coming from the do-it-yourself community. I saw a perfect example of this recently when I was at the craft store and I saw a display of Mason jars for sale, surrounded by suggestions for how to “upcycle” them. What?

It’s an inescapable truth that the materials we use for crafting have an environmental impact, and we consume a lot of them. (According to the Craft and Hobby Association in 2010, 56% of households in the U.S spent a total of $29 billion on crafting.) So from now until December, April and I have decided to embrace a post-Earth Day green Challenge: Don’t buy any new craft supplies. We’re choosing to call it the Destash Bash.

Destash Bash

Our goal is to be greener by finding alternatives whenever we are tempted to run out and buy something. For this reason anything found in thrift stores, free boxes, dumpsters, or our existing stash is still fair game. We’re also going to share at least two crafts following these parameters each month until December.

However, like all those other yarn diets, we are allowing one big out: We both realized that we value our crafting time too much to make crap. If a project absolutely will not work or look good without something and we can’t find it anywhere else, we are allowed to buy it. For example: I’m not going to finish a quilt I spent weeks on with the wrong color thread just because I’ve run out of the color I need. In these cases (and I do think they will be rare) We are going to document what we’ve bought and how much it cost.

This means we are going to have to sacrifice the thrill of seeing a project on Pinterest and dropping everything to get the stuff to make it. It means we’re going to have to give up having everything exactly the way we want it when we design a project. It means we will have to resist the siren call of fabric stores. But we’re hoping that this challenge will help us declutter our houses and revisit some of the great projects we’ve abandoned. It will force us to be more creative by working with what we have, and it will be better for the environment.

We’d love to see if anyone else is interested in joining our crusade.  We’ve never done a blog ring or anything before, but if you’re interested in trying this out with us and blogging about it, drop us a line in the comments and we’ll try to get something organized.  Here’s to experiments!

In the spirit of Destash Bash, I decided to use repurposed materials for our giveaway.  If you’ve ever purchased a pair of those ubiquitous Tom’s shoes, you know they come with a drawstring bag / flag that you’re supposed to wave proudly in support for your favorite canvas shoes.  In my experience, these bags usually end up somewhere under my bed never to be seen again.  I recently purchased a pair of Tom’s, and I saw a cool tutorial on Pinterest that demonstrated how to turn the bag into a wallet.

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I did experience my first wave of desperation about our experiment when I realized that all of my bobbins were occupied by thread – and not the color I wanted.  After quickly fighting down the urge to purchase a new set of bobbins before this challenge went into effect, I wound up the bobbin with the least amount of thread and continued quite easily with my project.

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I literally had no cash to display in the upper pocket.

If you’d like to win this wallet, let us know how long you think you could last without buying new craft supplies.  The giveaway will close at 5 PM PST on May 10th.  Sorry, we will only ship to U.S. and Canada for this giveaway.  Be sure to visit all the other giveaways and find new blogs to follow this week!

~Robin & April

DSLR Adventure

3 May

A while ago my brother upgraded to a new fancy-pants DSLR camera. He gave me his old Canon Rebel with the instructions to go out and only shoot in manual mode until I got the hang of it. I did: once. After two hours of shooting and playing with the controls I had a million photos of Joshua Tree that looked like this:

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I kind of gave up.

The camera sat in my room for months collecting dust. I would take it out occasionally (ie, when my other camera was dead,) and take a few shots in auto mode and stare at the little “M” on the dial with pangs of regret and guilt. Then Yosemite did something that provided the motivation I needed.

I made a little cheat sheet reminding me about F#s and their relationship with aperture, and what the heck ISO is. I grabbed the camera, borrowed a tripod, and hiked up the Four Mile Trail in the dark. I took over a hundred photos that night but one of them turned out like this:

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The handful of shots that weren’t too dark, too blown out, or too blurry were totally worth it. I’m not the next Ansel Adams or Nancy Robbins, but I feel pretty successful. Of course, it would have still been worth it if all I had gotten out of the experience was a chance to see Yosemite out do itself by making a rainbow out of freakin’moonbeams!

~Robin

P.S. Thanks to Derek Ferguson for convincing me to borrow the tripod. That was clutch.

P.P.S. There’s a Yosemite Nature Notes on Moonbows!

After Earth Day: Giveaway Announcement!

1 May

I feel like I should say thank you one more time for celebrating Earth Day with us, but I figure you’re tired of the constant gratitude.  Let’s get to the prizes already!

The Go Glass / mug cozy goes to…

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randomnumber12

Manda Kay who uses less water when she can.

Now for the insulated mugs…

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Looks like the random number generator is favoring those that entered later in the game.  Good move guys.  Number 11 would be Mara, who led an Earth Day Hike.

I’ll email you both shortly to get your address and see to whom you’d like your tree dedicated. Thanks to all who entered and have a lovely May!

~April

The Earth Day Index

30 Apr

Earth Day Banner

I hope you enjoyed our 30 Days of Earth Day series.  We really enjoyed working on it!  Since we’re both pretty research-oriented, I’m sure it was a lot to take in, so to make life easier we created an index of all the resources we shared over the month – plus a few extras!  You can view all the posts in our Earth Day series right here.

Ways to Go Green
How to Save Energy by Eliminating Phantom Loads
How Smart Power Strips Work
10 Ways to Go Green and Save Green
Saving Money by Going Green
Xeriscape
Earth Friendly Tips for a Lush Lawn
19 Easy Home Winterization Projects
12 Household Appliances You Should Unplug to Save You Money
How to Turn Down Your Hot Water Heater
10 Tips for the Thermostat
Pledge an Act of Green
Audit Your Home’s Energy Usage

Going Green in the Kitchen
How to Go Green: In the Kitchen
8 Ways to Go ‘Green’ in Your Kitchen
Go Green in the Kitchen
5 Simple Kitchen Composting Tips
Refrigerators: Cooling Down Your Electric Bill

Going Green in the Laundry Room
A Clothesline will Save Big Money, Energy and Carbon Emissions
8 Trips for a Green Laundry
Washing Machine Water Usage
Chronic Over-Washer?
Go Green in the Laundry Room
Green Laundry Tips
How to Go Green: Laundry

Going Green in the Bathroom
Navy Showers
The Great Unwashed
How to Convert Any Toilet to a Low Flush Toilet
If It’s Yellow, Let It Mellow
Replace Your Kitchen and Bathroom Faucets
10 Ways to Green Your Bathroom
How to Go Green: In the Bathroom

Going Green on the Go
How to Ditch Your Car and Bike Everywhere
How to Start a Carpool
Save Gas, Money, and the Environment with Properly Inflated Tires
Public Transportation Benefits
Environmental Benefits of Bicycling

Water
National Geographic Water Footprint Calculator
Grace Water Footprint Calculator
Kemira Water Footprint Calculator
Of Farms, Folks, and Fish
California’s Water-Energy Relationship
Water-related Energy Use in California
A New Plan to Fix California Water System
Greywater
How to Check for Water Leaks
Fixing Leaks Around the Home
Earth-Friendly Water Saving Tips

Reduce, Recycle, Reuse
Terracycle
Reduce, Reuse, Recycle Revisited
Online Catalogs
Paper Karma (app)
How to Dispose of CFLs
How to Make a Party Box
Paper, Plastic, or Something Better?
1-800-Recycling
Council for Textile Recycling

The Planet, Nature, And Us
The Economic Impact of Climate Change
The Environmental Justice Movement
Almost Everything You Need to Know About Environmental Justice
Race and Poverty Matter, Even on Earth Day
Environmental Justice Organizations
Greenbelt Movement
Give Us National Parks, But Please, Not Its Regulations
Diversity in the Outdoors
We’re Rich! (In Nature)
National Wildlife Federation
Outside Mom
National Get Outdoors Day
National Park Foundation
Trust for Public Land
Nature Deficit Disorder
National Park Service Volunteer Page
Plant a Tree
Benefits of Parks
Health Benefits of the Natural World

Food
Environmental Benefits of Organic and Local Food
Local Harvest CSA Locator
5 Reasons Not to Drink Bottled Water
Cannery Launches a CSA for Seafood
Community Supported Agriculture for Meat and Eggs
Smoky Tomato and Lentil Soup
Seafood Watch Ocean Issues
Unhappy Meals – Michael Pollan
Organic vs. Pesticides
The Carbon Footprint of Food

Interactive Education
Without a Map’s Earth Day YouTube Playlist
OpenYale Courses
Harvard Open Courses
webcast.Berkeley
MIT Open Courseware
Udacity
Edx
Open Education Database
Intro to Environmental Science
iTunes U
Coursera
TED Talks: Environment
Good Dirt (podcast)
Living on Earth (podcast)
NPR Environment Podcast
NPR: Climate Connections Podcast
Monster Talk (podcast)
Slate’s Table to Farm (podcast)
Radiolab (podcast)

DIY
Big Box Detox
How To Make Plarn
T-Shirt Surgery
Upcycling on Craftster
Upcycling on Pinterest
Rolled Kitchen Towels Tutorial
Green Crafting Round-up
20+ Unique Bird Feeders
How to Make Hypoallergenic Laundry Detergent
Tipnut

Buying Green
Upcycling Becomes a Treasure Trove for Green Business Ideas
Good Guide
Save the Environment with Thrift Shopping
Alternative Reuseable Menstrual Products
Online Shopping: Better for the Environment?
Better World Shopper
How to Shop Green

Green Products We Mentioned
Alchemy Goods
Klean Kanteen
Platypus Bottle
Bobble Bottles
Silpat
Energy STAR Qualified Products
Go Glass
Contigo Autoseal Mugs
Ecologix Daily Planner
Glad Rags
Diva Cup
Energy STAR Light Bulbs
Soap Nuts
Folding Laundry Rack

And Some Other Fun Stuff…
Eco-Chick
Geocaching
If Your Kids Are Awake, They’re Probably Online
Earth Day Events
I=PAT
Captain Planet
Where Does a Mother’s Time Go?
The Future of Leisure that Never Arrived
5 Marketing Lessons from the Bottled Water Industry

Thanks for joining us!

~April and Robin

Earth Day: Recycling Wrap Up

30 Apr

Earth Day Banner

You can call me a procrastinator because, well, I am.  While I’ve dutifully been recycling this month, I completely avoided going to the actual recycling center until about 9 AM this morning.  I didn’t even go to the closest one.  Instead I opted for the one on my drive to work.  And my experience?  I drove in, dropped off my one bag of paper recycling and headed out.  That’s it.  I think it took less than 5 minutes since I made it to work on time at 9:30.

So what have a learned from a month of getting back in the recycling habit?

  • I don’t generate a lot of recycling.  Over the month I ended up with two paper bags of mixed plastic and glass and one paper bag of paper as well as two or three cardboard boxes.  It’s not as much as I thought I’d have, but it’s still a substantial enough amount for one person to continue the habit.
  • It takes no time.  Seriously.  I can’t imagine that the actual separation of recycling and drop off at the center (and mostly at my boyfriend’s house or work) took up more than 15-20 minutes of my entire month.
  • Robin is right.  Reduce.  Reduce.  Reduce.  That’s the key to making recycling super easy.  When you don’t bring many new items into your house to recycle, it’s easier to recycle what you do have.
  • Recycling centers still scare me.  I don’t know why.  I feel like they should be havens of green in a nice park-like area or something, but they’re always tucked into shady parking lots or in industrial wastelands.  It turns out trash isn’t a pretty job.

Earth Day isn’t quite over.  We still have our giveaway open until 11:59 PM PST tonight, so don’t forget to enter.  Robin and I are a little Earth Day-ed out by now, but we have a ton of great posts coming up, including the announcement of a new challenge.  Thanks for spending the month with us.

~ April

Earth Day: And Beyond!

29 Apr

Earth Day Banner

At the beginning of the month I asked two questions:

1. Why do you want to go green?

Some of the reasons I thought of were to save money, to help someone else, because you just love the planet, or just because it’s the cool thing to do.

My Earth Day challenge to shorten the length of my showers made me realize that there was a better way to ask the second question:

2. What are your most abundant and least abundant resources?

I still think it’s important to understand what you have and don’t have to help you go green, but I realized that knowing you have an abundance of something doesn’t necessarily mean you are willing to give it up.

After many many years of talking about the environment, I’ve realized that it’s impossible to live a planet-friendly lifestyle without giving up something. It may be the extra money you spend on green products, it may be the time you spend schlepping stuff to the recycling center, or maybe it’s the satisfaction of buying what you want when you want it.

So my new question is this:

2a. What are you willing to sacrifice?

When I started thinking about how to shorten my showers, I realized pretty quickly that I was unwilling to give up taking hot showers. I could make some concessions like taking a bath on the days when I come home from work freezing cold and in need of warmth. But I was still taking long showers.

I wanted to be all scientific about tracking my shower times, but I failed pretty hard at that one. Mostly I would forget to start or stop my stop watch at the beginning or end of my shower, and because I wasn’t rigorous enough to record the date when I did manage to get an accurate time.

My data for March (kinda) looked like this:

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A (very) rough estimate averages my shower time before I started the challenge is 30 minutes per shower. (I told you they were long.)

As I started the challenge in April I didn’t have much success in shortening my shower time. Even if I tried to be super efficient I only shaved off a few minutes of my time. This was frustrating, but I realized that I was spending a ridiculous amount of time messing with my hair. Ironically, I think I spent more time taking care of my hair in a single shower than I did in all of the days between showers.

And that’s when I realized that my hair was something I didn’t mind sacrificing.

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So I got it cut.

I’m really enjoying the new haircut, and I could tell even before I managed to accurately time my shower that I was spending less time in the shower. My (again, very approximate) data for April looked like this.

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I plan to continue this challenge beyond April. Just because I failed hard at keeping track of my shower times in April doesn’t mean I can’t be better about it in May. Our planet is facing some serious environmental problems, and they aren’t going to go away if we only spend one day a year thinking about them. This is one way I can make a difference, and I will keep on trying.

I am hoping that you have also found a reason to go green, a way to go green that fits your lifestyle, and that you are willing to sacrifice something to do it. Please, feel free to share them here or leave a comment under our Earth Day Giveaway before tomorrow to enter to win some eco-prizes.

Stay green my friends!

~Robin

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Earth Day: A Favorite Resource

28 Apr

Earth Day Banner

Whether you’re looking for natural recipes for weed killers, air fresheners or bath products, TipNut has links to all sorts of things to make your life greener and more natural.

Here are some of my favorite tips:
Homemade Herbal Cleaner Recipes
Color Enhancing Shampoos & Rinses
20 Things You Can Use Twice Before Tossing
25 Vintage Household Tips
12 Easy Ways to Go Green (And Save Cash)

~April

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