Ho.Handmade: Cushion Covers

This post has been a long time coming. A LONG time. I designed and made these cushions during January. However I never got a chance to photograph the finished product. Can you believe that? I wanted to photograph them during the day and somehow I was barely at home in the mornings these past few weeks. Anyhoo, I got my *bleep* together and I am pleased to present to you: handmade cushion covers.

As many of you know, we moved to a new apartment a few months back and ever since then, I have been trying to design it project by project. The first (and fairly easy) project was finding/making some bright cushion covers for my two sofas. After window shopping for a bit, I could not find designs I liked or stuff I liked was way too expensive (almost always the case!). So I started hunting for fabric with one design idea in mind: the covers should be up-down; front back and left-right flip-able, so I could play with them as I fancied. For this concept to work, I would need a variety of fabric.

My first (and last) destination was Purl Soho. I LOVE LOVE LOVE that shop. It's like walking into wonderland! My brain kicks into high gear every time I go here. I found this lovely pre-cut fabric bundle (18"x 24"). I fell for the colors and patterns and I had the "this is it!!!" moment! :)

I also bought smaller pre-cut fabric bundles for accents and other projects.

 And then, I got to work:

 After a few hours, this happened: 

 A few more hours later, these happened:

Flip up, flip down; front the back or back the front; go right or left; play till your heart's content

Ho.Guests: De-Plastification

by Minu Agarwal

Hi P, thank you for inviting me to foocloho. Loving it! I'm here to share my thoughts about something I dread: PLASTIC. A friend once told me about a product-designer friend of his, who was designing packaging for a disposable shaver. The packaging looked cool, but apparently the packaging had more plastic in it than the shaver! That just stuck in my head and since then have been trying to rid my life of all unnecessary plastic.

First one to go was liquid body wash (contained in a plastic bottle) replaced by the trusty old soap bar. Who wants to smell like a pomegranate anyway after a shower? So in the last two years, we (my husband and I) 'prevented' or at least reduced the demand for 24 plastic bottles. I now buy soap at all kinds of discount stores like Marshalls etc. which have awesome deals on high quality triple milled soaps. They last longer, don't dry out the skin and leave less scum. Also got me a nice soap dish to make sure they dry out after use. I do keep a small bottle of liquid soap for guests, in case they don't want to use the 'communal' soap.

Also, when I buy soap bars, I look out for packaging that can be used in some way instead of just tossing it out. I found soap bars packaged in pretty boxes (as seen below) at Marshalls. I reuse them as a jewelry boxes or just to store small knick knacks. But no matter where you buy or what packaging the soap bars come in, I think we can safely assume that the soap bar packaging is usually less wasteful than liquid soap.

I reused this box to store jewelry

All images taken by Minu Agarwal

About Minu:
Minu works in the field of Sustainable Design. She shares what she enjoys most with her family and friends on her provocatively titled blog: "What's wrong with the right things?". She recently discovered her passion for being an entrepreneur with a venture started in early 2011 called realism.in. Minu lives with her husband in Atlanta working towards her way to a dream retirement in the Himalayas. When I asked her about what she likes to do in her free time, she said: 'apart from annoying my husband, I like to cook, snoop around the city on my bike and paint'.

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Thank you for your contribution Minu, I'm sure foocloho-ians will enjoy this read!

Ho.Find: Food Paint + Green Depot

Yesterday, I told you that we moved into a new apartment, which, btw we lovingly named: "L'Aponeota" - stands for the Apartment of the Nerd and the Otaku. I am bent on making the interiors of this apartment very "green". In search of green products and finishes, I found a very interesting finish: Food-based paint. Anna Sova sells a paint that has 90% ingredients derived from the same ingredients that go into milk, chocolate, fiber bars and donuts! This paint is healthy and has zero VOCs! I personally get a very bad migraine with new paint smell and there have been times when a strong smell triggered an asthma attack. So I'm all for no VOC stuff!

Anywhoo, while looking for a place to buy these Anna Sova paints, I stumbled upon 'Green Depot', which is like Home Depot but only retails 'green' products. Isn't the concept amazing! Now I can find all green products at one place! Yay! Allow me to give you a quick tour of this shop:

View from the street

The Building: According to the Green Depot blog, the building at 222 Bowery St was built by YMCA in 1885 to be its Young Men's institute. From there on, the building housed a myriad of functions before becoming the LEED Platinum certified Green Depot Flagship store. (Apparently, this is the first LEED Pt. retail building in NYC and the second in the country)

The Architect: Studio Mapos LLC

What are VOCs? It is that new paint smell... See the informative sign below

Anna Sova food paint!!!

They have three more brands of paint that have no/low- VOCs and between the four brands you can pretty much find which ever color you are looking for.

An array of paint colors

They have another concept that blew me away! They carry their own cleaning supplies product line and once you empty your bottle, you need not buy a refill pack...

Green Depot brand of cleaners

You can just go to their refill bar and refill your bottle! How cool is that? This is like one of those ideas where you go 'why didn't anyone think of that before'? Well, maybe they did, but this is the first time I'm seeing it in action. The initial purchase of the bottle costs about $6 and the refill cost is 12 cents per fluid ounce, so you can fill just how much you feel is necessary or about $4 for 32 oz. So no more plastic wasted with the purchase of the refill pack!

The refill bar

They also carry green building products such as OSB, tiles, counter tops, lifestyle products etc.. check their website for a full product listing.

Green Depot is located just opposite this iconic building: The New Museum. I love that rose!

Don't fret if you are not in NYC, they have other branches on the East coast. Click here to launch the store locator.