A good friend of mine who works at Colonial Williamsburg makes his own holiday wreaths & garland every year. He’s won the blue ribbon for 2 years in a row. (Congrats!) I never would’ve thought there would be so much color from dried natural ingredients.  To put it all together, he uses hot glue for everything but the gum ball garlands, which are drilled and strung on wire. Here’s what he uses:

• Saw tooth oak leaves
• dried lemon slices
• peach pits
• catalpa pods (Monkey/indian cigars)
• Sweet gum seed pods (Gum balls)
• Yarrow
• white and blue globe ameranth

Cool that natural decor is again modern, green-wise. Even if in a traditional setting.

Offgrid had a great article this week about things people can do to live greenly without resorting to cave dwelling or making your own shoes from animal skins you’ve carefully saved from hunting.

It drives home the valid point that a green house doesn’t necessarily look any different from a non-green house. Sure, we prefer a simple geometry, clean line design in our own work, but there are a lot of things that green up a house regardless of style.

• minimal eave overhang of 1′. More overhang is better – it shields heat gain in the summer and can lengthen the lifespan of siding and exterior finishes
• smaller is better: in 1977 the average home size was 1700 SF. Today it’s 2500. As we’ve said so many times, bigger = more to heat/cool, clean, furnish, collect crap. You can only be in one room at a time. If you use a room once a year, consider converting another room temporarily for that once a year use.
• kitchens should match how you cook. (This is where we come in!) If you’re a microwave, wolf-it-down-out-of-the-package type, don’t have a kitchen that has 3 ovens and takes up 500SF! And if you do like to cook at home, have a kitchen that has enough space and the right equipment to work for you.

The article also goes on to mention tips on insulation, renewable options, and natural ventilation. This section especially cracked me up:

What good are solar panels and recycled woods tacked on to a McMansion? Fact is, the sustainable homes of the future look a lot like those of the past.

Yesterday, for the second time in a couple of months, someone chuckled at my suggestion to use bamboo as a countertop or flooring material. It dawned on me that the image coming to their mind is something out of Gilligan’s Island – something that conjures up tiki themed parties and knick-knacks (of which I’m guilty of owning a few).

The bamboo surface *I’m* talking about is created in a way that’s smooth, so it’s more like plywood than rough terrain. It can also have interesting variation in grain and pattern, depending on which way it’s cut through the stalk. Bamboo building products are made by laminating strips of bamboo together with low VOC adhesives and a hot press. So a whole bunch of strips put together make a large piece to work with just like you would with plywood.

One company that makes bamboo construction products is Plyboo. My sample box came the other day, and it includes several tongue-and-groove, horizontal and vertical grain, butcher block parquet, and panel and veneer samples. They all look great, whether naturally finished (similar to beech) or caramel finish (similar to oak). I wouldn’t use the darker finish in a small space, though. Bamboo has the same warmth of more commonly used hardwoods like oak, and is basically the same to work with, construction-wise. Bamboo is harder than maple and lighter than oak, and requires the same maintenance as hardwoods. More on bamboo at Wikipedia.

What makes bamboo green is that it’s rapidly sustainable – it replaces itself in 5 years. And Plyboo uses water based, low VOC solvents and finishes. And it’s beautiful! I can’t wait to do some countertops with this stuff.

In the Triangle area, you can get Plyboo products at Caragreen, which is located at 109A Brewer Lane in Carrboro.

[where: 27510]

DESU Design just goes to show that simple, beautiful and green can coexist beautifully. The Inversion Bowl (left) is made of certified renewable cellulose fiber and resin. The white material for HUG (right) is similar to Corian or Avonite, and looks equally clean & elegant.