A purpose. A big Idea. A why. A core principle.

It’s called many different things – I like to think of it as the foundation.

Shutting down my silversmithing business, left me in a sort of vacuum. What know? If I wasn’t a successful silversmith, what was I? What would my purpose be, if not designing luxurious silver pieces?

Changing direction was – is – both scary and exciting. Scary, because maybe I can’t be equally successful at this new direction. Scary because every possibility in the world is open and that’s overwhelming. It’s also exciting for the same reason, that every possibility is open to me.

What would you do if you could do anything?

Even if I have a clear idea with MadeFromCrap, I still get distracted or take a detour, get of the course. MadefromCrap is still new, the journey has just started, it’s part of defining the foundation to try of different things. You learn through action, not thought. But I also think the beginning, the start up is a very fragile stage, where it’s almost too easy to loose perspective.

So, in order to steer back, refine and help myself move forward I made this little reminder today. And the good thing is, I think it could be applied to both your business, your design principles – and even your life.

It [replace 'it' with whatever you are trying to refine] must:

• have purpose – a meaning, function, reason
• make a difference – matter, innovate, do/help/be something for others
• come naturally to you – feel easy, inspiring, exciting, doing it your own way
• be fun – fill you up, energize you, make you forget time & place

I think, that if you know the answer to these 4 points, you’re well on your way. It’s no easy way, or easy answers, but they will provide you with a direction and clarity. They are the ones I use as the guide for my core design foundation and I will make them, define them for the MadeFromCrap business.

Do you have a way to guide the direction of your business, design principle, life… ? I’d love to know in the comments below.

When I had my silversmith business I used to make Christmas decorations in September and because shops start decorating in November, I get tired of it before we’re even in December.  It hasn’t been quite the same this year, as I haven’t had any hardcore Christmas sales to pimp – so when I started doing research for this Christmas Ornament project two weeks ago, I felt really excited.

In my mind it’s still a bit early to start decorating for Christmas, at least at home. I know some start the first Sunday of Advent, so I wanted to get this tutorial ready for you now, so you could collect materials and start preparing.

The DIY Christmas decorations tutorial includes a downloadable pdf with

• everything you need to know before you start
• a step by step how to make it yourself tutorial in text & images
• a video you can download

and it is free, you do need to fill in all your details, but there’s no charge – go get it here.

If you go ahead and make them, I would love to see what you’ve done – so either post here or send me an email with a photo.

How they always seem to get loose, really quickly?

Or if you have fine hair like me, and use the rubber ones with no metal connection bits, to avoid your hair from breaking – how they suddenly break and you are left with really bad ponytail hairdo?

I haven’t got a super solution, but I have an alternative to making lots of them, fast easy and it’s free.

Cut your old inner tube into upcycled elastic hair bands.

Even if this is pretty easy – I made you a little tutorial, just for the fun of it.

Here’s the Make It Yourself Tutorial including:

•  Everything you need to know before you start
•  A step by step tutorial in text & images
• A video tutorial

To download the pdf click here

I also made a video – it’s part of the tutorial, but you can watch it here too

The experiment, when I first read the guidelines, seamed a little extreme. Collecting my trash for a day, trying not to make any trash at all, buying only local, reducing my electricity, water usage – honestly it seamed like a kick back to the stone age.
I’ll be the first to admit, that living no impact style like Colin Beavan and his family for a whole year takes determination and maybe a little extremism, but they have my deepest respect for trying to live fully by what they believe in. And having given it a go myself for only one week, I think it’s admirable and very inspiring.

It seems like a lot of effort to live a no impact lifestyle. So, is it actually possible to live more sustainable, with little or no effort?

During my week of Low Impact I discovered two very important things about the way we live.

One – we are actually not making as big an impact as I thought. And by changing just a few simple things in our daily routines, we’ve made that impact smaller, and not sacrificed that much.
Here are some of the things we already do or changed:

• Have 4 vegetarian days a week – “eating fewer animal products can be the single greenest move you can make” – and just by picking the local option from your grocery store or going to the farmers market you’re well on your way to reducing your impact.
• Burn calories not fossil fuels – since we don’t have a car, and cycle everywhere – this was easy. But thinking about your transportation as a way to burn calories, certainly makes getting on the bike on a rainy day a lot easier.
• Not buying new things. Since I started the project 333 – about living with less – I haven’t really bought that many new things – and when I do I go for quality. Actually we’ve given a lot away and also sold stuff we don’t use any more (which I can sooo recommend – it’s a great feeling to get rid of those dust collectors).

The other really important thing I discovered during the project is how difficult is is to buy something that is not wrapped in layers of packaging. And it made me think about the responsibility of the designers & manufacturers.

When I went to the Royal College of Art in London, we were taught to think about packaging – but not in an environmental way – it was all about consumer experience. I’m sure designers are very aware of combining consumer experience with environmental responsibility today, but I’m sure more can be done. Just think about the ice-cream cone – a genius eat-able packaging.

The conclusion to a very interesting week of Low Impact, must be that – yes it is possible to live a more sustainable life with little or no effort. And – that there’s a lot you and I can do by just changing a few small habits in our lifestyle. Hopefully the designers & manufacturers will follow – I hope so.

Day Three

Burn calories not fossil fuels. Being a keen collector of inner tubes from car & bike tires, I did some research when I first started out too see how many tires we produce during a year – you can read what I found out here. The interesting thing here was that the production of bikes are by far higher than cars – 83 million bikes against 37 million cars, so there must be quite a few cyclists out there, eh?

And I’m one of them. We don’t own a car, and cycle pretty much everywhere in town. If it’s longer or really bad weather we take the bus or train. So this challenge was quite easy.

It did make me think about how we can effectively use the waste that does come from bikes, like the inner tubes, that aren’t recycled into new material. So expect more on that in the time to come – apart from the iPhone wallet I have in the developing, I think the material lends itself really well as a substitute for leather. Do you have any suggestions to stuff I could make out of inner tubes – do let me know in the comments below.

Day Four

Food. Locally produced food. My list of food from yesterday counts home-baked organic bread, cheese, coffee, butter, milk, fruits & then we had dinner at friends. Normally we have vegetarian dinner from organic vegetables grown in Denmark. I think my biggest challenge regarding food is to buy it without it being pre-packaged and finding local alternatives. Going to the local vegetable market on Saturday showed that a lot of the fruit there is from other countries. It all comes down to eating seasonal I think, getting most of what we need for the week at the Saturday market. As I’m off sick today – it was a bit of an odd food day anyway. I will definitely think about where and what I buy next time we need to top up the fridge.

Day One

It made me realise that we are actually up front with the consumption side of living a less impact life.

But I had to collect all our trash for the day, and that was a really good exercise – it made me think about how many of the things, food we buy that is wrapped in an excessive amount of plastic packaging, and how hard it is to get groceries without the plastic.

As part of being conscious about our trash, we went to feed the ducks our old bread. It felt really good to do something together as a family that also involved reducing our waste.

Day Two

Trash! This is my favourite no impact task of the week I think. Emptying the bag of Sundays trash was so much fun. Sorting it and seeing what we’d actually thrown out – very eye opening. I was surprised at the amount of vegetable trash that could be composted. But also the packaging – which is going to serve as inspiration for future MadeFromCrap projects, and will definitely be collected for the rest of the week, but also in the future.

The candy and bread plastic packaging is such a good material to sew inside a baby fabric toys. That noise it makes when you crunch it, so annoying, but pleasing at the same time.

Also the coffee packaging made me stop and think about what I could use that for. I love my coffee, so there’s more of that same packaging to come.

All in all, very interesting and inspiring.

I’m really looking forward to collecting more crap during this week and see what inspiration it can serve for MadeFromCrap projects.

If you’re doing this experiment too – feel free to share your experience in the comments. If you have any suggestions to crap I could reuse for a MadeFromCrap project, do let me know in the comments below.

Sendt via Blogsy

Colin Beavan from the No Impact Project – also known as No Impact Man.

In 2007 he tried to leave no impact on the environment for an entire year, meaning cutting out garbage, buying local & second-hand, cycling, reducing electricity and lots of other things.

He has in 2009 founded the No Impact Project where you can sign up to a No Impact Experiment for a week.

Watch the video for more …

I have joined the challenge, and will start the one-week carbon cleanse on Sunday 28th October 2012. You’re more than welcome to join me, the more the merrier - sign up here.

If you sign up – or just want to follow along – I’ll be posting my progress on the MadeFromCrap facebook page, so make sure you’ve liked it.

When you build a new concept, or design a new product – it all starts out with an idea. That idea gets worked on, tested, tried and refined, as part of the process. Actually for both a business and a design I think this is something you should keep doing, maybe each year. Nothing is static, the world, resources and techniques are constantly developing and changing. So it’s quite healthy to just refine your concept once in a while.

That’s what I’m doing here with MadefromCrap. Refining what it’s about. Or trying to make it clearer to me and you.

Here goes:

Virtual

Virtual has to do with being online and digital. That I don’t produce the products and by choosing to make virtual manuals I minimise the impact the material sourcing and manufacturing has on our environment. It means it’s all made locally where you are.

Upcycled

Here’s the Wikipedia definition:

“Upcycling is the process of converting waste materials or useless products into new materials or products of better quality or for better environmental value”

Maybe the name MadeFromCrap makes more sense now?

Upcycling takes materials that we already have, but would normally throw out and not only re-cycles them but up-cycles them. Meaning turn them into something of similar or better quality than it was before. What I’m doing with upcycling is based on materials that we all have a fair chance of getting hold of – materials we already use or have in for example our house. Which also means they are free!

DIY

Do It Yourself – it’s about the power of making and creating the things you use yourself. I think we appreciate stuff more if we know what it takes to make them.

Also I have faith in your skills and ability to make this yourself – I know you can do it!

But it’s also about sustainable production, because if you have to make it, then the materials (or crap) you use to make it is your own, or something you have sourced locally = good for the environment = good for you!

Design

Design is about the process from idea to finished design. It’s about telling the story of each design, each product – where it came from, why it has a role to play in yours or my life. It’s about transparency.

But it’s also about doing something a little more with the upcycling concept or idea. A lot of upcycled stuff I see out there are turning 3 toilet rolls into a pencil holder. That’s not what I’m trying to do. I want to show you and honour the full design process – that involves developing an idea, looking at the benefits and properties of the material and having a reason.

Good design is more than just a good idea!

Experience

Experience has a lot to do with learning by doing. The DIY part. But it’s also about you watching me and other designers do what we do best – design. And learn from that, or experience what we went through to create a certain piece.

Most importantly though – it’s about entertaining you and having fun. It’s about creating fascinating stories about the potential of our crap.

I truly hope you will enjoy them.

I made you a little time-lapse sequence of the process to watch.

I like how inner tube is a bit like leather, and think the stitching you get on really nice leather pieces would be good for the inner tube wallet too.

I also wanted to have a smooth inner side to the wallet, so it would be easy to get the iPhone in and out – as I have my grocery list app on the phone – so I’m lining it with nylon stocking.

As I got designing – one of the first challenges I’ve come across, is how to keep it all in place when sewing. I tried double sided tape – but it wouldn’t stick for very long. Probably because of the grease on the tube. So in the end I decided to sow without – and hope for the best.

But there are a few problem points – especially the corners – where the stitching hasn’t quite succeeded.

So I’m on to the next prototype to try and sort that out. Have any suggestions? Let me know in the comments below.

Here are the shots of the prototype wallet

Let me know what you think in the comments

I’ve had this discussion with myself and others over the past weeks, whether people would be willing to actually collect the materials required to use for my upcycling designs, and then sit and make it themselves?

There’s no doubt it does take a little bit more effort to get the materials for the designs, let alone make them, compared to just buying a finished product in a shop or online. But I must admit I have a (maybe naive) belief in the simplicity of this concept – besides it being a good environmental option.

I know how busy we are, and I too use the easy way out more often than I like to admit. But this project is not meant to be a raised finger in the environmental debate. It’s about having fun making something out of free materials we already have, that would normally get thrown away. It’s about doing it yourself, about daring to try something new – mind you – I’ll be showing you exactly how. It’s about doing it together – with your friends, your family, your colleagues.

It’s about thinking about the small thing we can all do to make a difference, but have fun doing it, while creating something of value.

I also think that you can see the purity and simplicity in keeping this concept purely digital.

I mean, I could design and make the pieces – then ship them to you. But besides saving ‘x’ amounts of carbon dioxide being released into our ecosystem – I like how the concept becomes very personal & local, when you source the materials near you. And how you are in control of the making, by doing it yourself. That means the piece will have a history and a story that means something to you. You know where the material came from, what it was before – and you know what went into making it – if it was difficult or easy. I’m thinking you’ll appreciate it more when it has you sweat, blood and laughter in it.

Am I wrong?

I think it’s just like a habit that needs changing – like sorting your garbage. I’m not oblivious to the fact that this does take extra effort, but I’m hoping you can see the benefits of it.

I think it’s a mindset thing – and all you need to do is be aware of what you’re getting rid of, then I believe you will automatically think about it the next time you throw something out that could be upcycled? We’re not talking materials that will be difficult to find. A very important part of the MadeFromCrap concept is, that the materials are things we use, have or can get hold of reasonably easy.

I would love to hear your thoughts on this. Would sourcing your own upcycling materials and making it yourself keep you from making an upcycled product? If the result was really awesome?