Eco Travel - Choosing a Green Hotel
The idea of greener vacations is becoming more and more possible these days and thanks to growing awareness and concern for the environment, it is also becoming very popular. Hotel visits are one of the easier more obvious ways to “green” your vacation. Here are several simple things you might want to consider to help make your hotel stay a little more earth friendly. More »
Shop Green
Shopping for eco-friendly items? Visit our directory of green online retailers. More »
Our Story and Why We Eat to Fight Cancer- Part 1: Berries
This is the first in a series of posts on eating to fight cancer, a topic that is very close to our family’s heart. We will be featuring ten foods that have cancer fighting properties with an explanation of what those properties are and a favourite recipe of ours that includes cancer fighting ingredients. More »
Homemade Bird Food
n some parts of North America there is a shortage of fruit and nuts during the winter months. This means a lot of wild birds will be very hungry this time of year. You can help feed them. Save money by eliminating store bought bird feed and decrease your waste by using kitchen scraps to make homemade bird feed. More »
Raising a Child to be a Minimalist
There is a growing trend toward raising children in a minimalist, non-materialistic way. It is an uphill climb when you choose to raise your children in a frugal, non-consumerism sort of way, you are up against powerful advertising media and outside influences that you have no control over. More »
Book Review: The Elemental Journal
I was quite excited when I was given the opportunity to review ”The Elemental Journal- Composing Artful Expressions From Items Cast Aside” by Tammy Kushmir. The title had me envisioning all sorts of
interesting projects that my daughter and I could recycle unwanted items into.
Unfortunately, while the pictures are beautifully done and the instructions are very detailed and easy to follow, the projects seem to be pretty useless. All of the projects created are meant to be used as some kind of journal but none of them are big enough to hold more than a couple of items and none of them are very practical. You would have to make an awful lot of them to be able to store anywhere near the amount of keepsakes that most people have and even then you would be able to store only the smallest ones.
Yes the book is very creative and artistic but I would consider the projects more miniature works of art than actual journals. I was expecting the book to use more practical everyday “cast aside” items instead of items that most people do not necessarily have laying around. The only things that are used that would be fairly easy to find are the natural items such as tree bark, twigs etc and these are things that I wouldn’t really consider “cast aside”.
In the end it was probably my own expectations of the book that let me down. I was hoping for some ideas for recycling everyday things into useful items and while this book does have some interesting ideas, I found the projects in it far from useful.
