Category Archives: Green

Get Off Junk Mail Lists

January 8th, 2010 in Green
By Zinnia Heinzmann

Junk_Mail

We all hate junk mail. On average, Americans receive about 41 pounds of junk mail each year! According to 41pounds.org, that’s equal to over 100 million trees, 28 billion gallons of water, and more C02 than 9 million cars! Yikes!

Here are a few free and easy ways to cut down on junk mail:

Get Your Address on the Do Not Mail List
Remove your address from national marketing lists by registering online for free with the Direct Marketing Association (DMA).

Reduce Bundled Flyers & Ad Supplements
Look for the mailing label attached to the flyer and contact the company directly to request your address be removed from their mailing list. Here are a few of the major resident mailers to contact:

- Valassis or Red Plum > Fill out their online form.
- Penny Saver or The Flyer > Check their site to opt out via email or phone.
- Val-Pak Savings Coupons > Fill out their online form.

Catalogs, Mail Orders & Magazines
Opt out of the Epsilon Abacus Coop database, and/or contact the catalog or mail order company directly to be removed from their mailing list.

Have any other junk mail tips? Anyone upcycling their junk mail into cool collages or other crafts? Post your projects and share your junk mail ideas with us!

Friendly Fronds

December 31st, 2009 in Green
By Zinnia Heinzmann

Indoor_Garden

One of the fastest ways to go green is to get an indoor plant. Think you don’t have a green thumb? You’d be surprised at how easy many houseplants are to take care of. Here’s a list of plants that look beautiful and are practically foolproof:

-       African Violet (Saintpaulia ionantha)
-       Aloe (Aloe Asphodelaceae)
-       Baby Rubber Plant, Peperomia (Peperomia obtusifolia)
-       Cast Iron Plant (Aspidistra)
-       Chinese Evergreen (Aglaonema)
-       Coleus (Solenostemon)
-       Corn Plant (Dracaena fragrans massangeana)
-       Cyclamen (Cyclamen hederifolium)
-       Devil’s Ivy (Golden Pothos)
-       Dwarf Palm (Collinea)
-       Heart-leaf Philodendron (Philodendron cordatum)
-       Jade Plant (Crassula)
-       Kalanchoe (Mother of Millions)
-       Lady Palms (Rhapis Excelsa)
-       Peace Lily (Spathiphyllum)
-       Ponytail Palm (Nolina recurvata)
-       Snake Plant (Sansevieria trifasciata)
-       ZZ Plant (Zamioculcas zamiifolia)

Indoor plants are the best way to brighten up a room, lift your spirits, and improve air quality! Think we’re joking? Here’s a study that shows how indoor plants increase your health and productivity. Can’t seem to finish that quilt or craft project? Try sticking a plant in your studio and see what happens!

Have any tips for budding green thumbs, or photos of your indoor gardens? Share ‘em with us!

Recycle & Upcycle at the Library!

December 11th, 2009 in Green
By Zinnia Heinzmann

Are your shelves sagging with the weight of your crafting library, but you can’t bear to toss those fondly-remembered titles? Consider donating them to your local library! Give them a call. Most public libraries accept lightly used books to add to their underfunded collections or to sell in bargain sales to support other programs. Either way they’ll get a second (green) life while benefitting your community!

Library sales are also a great place to find scrapbooking and paper crafts treasures for cheap! Sift through the stacks as if you’re in a paper store, and keep a keen eye out for sumptuous gold-stamped bindings, antique text pages, scribbled notes hidden in poetry books, marbled papers, bookplates, etc. to add to your next collage. Don’t forget to look through the children’s section for rich lithographs and etchings, or for unique bright colors and patterns. Kids books are often the cheapest, sometimes less than a dollar a piece!

Check out the next library sale in your community and let us know what you find!

Furoshiki!

December 4th, 2009 in Green
By Zinnia Heinzmann

Furoshiki_Wrap

Want to green your gift wrapping? Try furoshiki! About 1300 years ago in Japan, folks started bundling goods and gifts in square cloths, called furoshiki. Over time, wrapping gifts with furoshiki became quite an an art, and the wrapping itself was almost more appreciated than what was inside! These simple fabric wraps are wonderfully versatile, and can be used to conceal and decorate gifts of all shapes and sizes.

Furoshiki are like a gift in themselves—colorful patterned squares that can be used over and over again as practical packages. For basic folding instructions, take a look at these sample furoshiki wraps from the Japanese Ministry of the Environment. Looking for a great furoshiki pattern? Check out the napkin patterns in Oh Sew Easy® Table Toppers by Jean Wells & Valori Wells—they’re just perfect for fabric wraps!

Take a photo of your furoshiki-wrapped gifts and share your folding creations with us!

Drip Irrigation in the C&T Garden

November 20th, 2009 in Green
By Zinnia Heinzmann

Drip_Irrigation

According to the EPA, over half of the water used by American families to irrigate their yards is wasted. This is especially clear in sunny California, where folks water their lawns with garden hoses at noon. There’s certainly nothing green about that!

Not so at C&T! Our little front garden is maintained by our very own Green Thumbs, and is on a timed watering system. Most of our garden plants require little water now that they’re established, so a quick early morning shower is all they need.

Want to green your own garden? Most patio or container garden drip systems cost about $20, and setup takes just a few hours. Your local hardware or garden store will likely sell the necessary materials.

Getting started is super easy! Screw in a multi-outlet drip head to your water line, connect lines of tubing to your drip outlet, and lace them inconspicuously through your pots and beds. Attach sprayers or bubblers, or simply perforate your tubing for the most economical drip system. If you already have a sprinkler system on a timer, you won’t have to worry about a thirsty garden again. It’ll keep the green in your garden and in your wallet, too!

Have any other great water-saving tips? Let us know!

My Recycled FedEx Tarp

November 5th, 2009 in Green
By Zinnia Heinzmann

FedEx_Tarp Here at C&T we recycle everything—even our old FedEx Paks! When we can’t turn them inside-out and reuse them for a new package shipment, we send them back to DuPont to be recycled into new Tyvek bags. Check out DuPont’s Tyvek recycling program here.

Tyvek is amazing stuff! The plastic fibers used to create the material are fused, not woven, so it’s not only waterproof, but airtight too! When it came time to retire my old bike tarp, I turned to our recycled FedEx Pak stash at work and voila! My new tarp!

I had a blast arranging the printed FedEx logos into a pleasing pattern and sewing them together. Because the tarp lives outside, I sealed my seams with specially made Tyvek tape on both sides to make it extra weatherproof. So far it’s worked out great!

Anyone have any fun Tyvek projects they’re working on? I can’t wait to see ‘em!

C&T Plant-A-Tree-Fund

July 10th, 2009 in Green
By Todd Hensley

Late last year C&T’s Green Team partnered with three outstanding organizations to help offset the ecological cost of creating and shipping books. We created a new product titled C&T Plant-A-Tree Fund and let our customers know that by donating $1.00 to the C&T Plant-A-Tree Fund, we will forward 100% of all donations collected, split into equal payments, to these three non-profit organizations:

American Forests
Trees, Water & People
The Nature Conservancy – Plant A Billion Trees

So far we’ve raised about $250 and while it’s not a huge amount of money, it’s planted about 250 trees. The next time you visit our website, please add the Plant-A-Tree Product to your order and know you are making a difference.

Please join us in saving our planet, one dollar at a time.

Visit C&T’s new eBook and Download site

April 24th, 2009 in Behind the Scenes, Green, Industry & News
By Todd Hensley

We are really excited to announce that Casey just put the finishing touches on the new C&T eBook and Download site yesterday. This is where you can find all of our eBooks and eProjects we’ve published over the past 3 months. We will be adding many more titles in the coming weeks, so please check back often.

The site is easier to navigate and find what you’re looking for. We’ve added a nifty feature that allows you to preview a book before you buy it. Simply click on the Google Preview button and you’ll be able to view up to 20% of the eBook.

Lastly, we’ve got an RSS feed that you can subscribe to which will keep you updated when we add new titles. Enjoy!

Being Green in the Studio

March 31st, 2009 in Elsewhere, Green
By Lynn Koolish

Even though Kermit said “It’s not easy being green,” being a shade, a tint, or a tone of green isn’t too hard. When my quilting studio at home was built, we couldn’t go all green, but taking a cue from the green effort at C&T, here’s what we did do:

We used cork tile for the floors. Cork comes from cork oak trees and the bark is harvested every 9–15 years, so the trees are not cut down. Cork flooring is made from the waste left over from the making of cork bottle stoppers, so it’s a very ecologically friendly material.

The lights in the studio are full-spectrum fluorescent bulbs. These lights duplicate sunlight so you’re able to see colors accurately. Because the bulbs are fluorescent they are very efficient and long lasting. I’ve had mine for over six years and haven’t had to replace them yet. The studio gets lots of natural light, so I only need to turn on the lights at night or when it’s overcast during the day.

I store my thread and small notions in a recycled card catalog. When libraries replaced their old card catalogs with computers, all the old wooden file drawers and cabinets were removed. Often made of oak, the cabinets and drawers are not only very handy, but remind me of happy hours spent in public libraries. My unit was cut in half so that it could also be a window seat—that is if it wasn’t always covered with stuff.

I store rulers, papers, drawings and other flat things in a recycled flat file. These drawers are often found in architect’s offices. Along with the card catalog, we found these drawers at an architectural salvage yard. My DH built the files into a worktable. The top of the unit is half light table and half cork-topped. The bottom has cubby holes for miscellaneous storage (they also double as a convenient kitty hiding place).

When it came time to find handles and knobs for some of the drawers and cabinet doors, I used old wooden spools. The spools still had some thread on them and I liked the color so I coated them with a water-based sealer to protect them.

p1000554 How are you being green? Let us know.

The Latest Thing in Green Quilting

February 5th, 2009 in Green, Industry & News
By Christine Mann

When it comes to making something new and fabulous by reusing old materials, our author Wendy Hill has always been way ahead of the curve. She sewed this raincoat from recycled plastic bread bags decades ago, when she was in high school and green was still just a color, not a worldwide movement.

Wendy Hill's Wonderbread raincoat

Wendy’s latest innovation is just as far out in front of the crowd: quilting and making jewelry with recycled zippers. See this article in the Bend, Oregon Bulletin for the story of her new fascination with zippers and how she is transforming zippers donated by generous souls all around the country into new creative projects.

Wendy is an award-winning quilter and the author of two books from C&T: Easy Bias-Covered Curves and Fast, Fun & Easy® Incredible Thread-A-Bowls. She’ll have a new bias-covered curve quilt in the May/June issue of Fons & Porter’s Love of Quilting, so watch for her there.

Zip it, baby! Wendy's first zipper quilt

Zip it, baby! Wendy's new zipper quilt

C&T Publishing is a group of quilters and crafters dedicated to publishing products tailored to our audience. This blog is where we break away from book schedules and marketing campaigns to focus on what drives us to be creative and how this creativity manifests itself in our every day lives.