SA VA workers sewing buttons on the line's 'Allison' jacket. All pics from SA VA blog.

If you’d like a neat inside look into the process of starting up a fair-trade, good-wage-paying, hyper-local boutique in Philly, check out the SA VA blog. Owner Sarah van Aken and other staffers discuss the nuts and bolts leading to the opening of their store at 1700 Sansom on Saturday, from sheetrock to design to garment construction. Three quarters of the stuff at SA VA will be clothing made on site, as in next door, as Van Aken says she’s tired of lying awake at night worrying about her carbon footprint and tsunamis:

SA VA garment center

…and the place’s mission statement is full of other pretty excellent sounding stuff: creating 22 new fair-compensation jobs in Philly in the next two years, producing locally and using fair-trade and organic materials.

Vera blouse

Shopping at SA VA will be by “event,” encouraging people to shop for their clothes depending on their needs:  “Workday,” “Night Out,” “First Date,” “Saturday” or “Dress Up.” Sizes range from 2 to 16, and price will range from $40 for a shirt to $350 for a hand-printed, hand-sewn coat or dress, which… admittedly a bit out of my price range, to be sure, but readers who already shop at, I dunno, J.Crew or Banana Republic or other mid-range stores might want to seriously consider outfitting themselves in clothes that are good for Philly.

Nearly finished space

Hey DIY/ETSY kids, remember that post I did a week or two back about Atomic Catwalk? Well, if you haven’t been in touch with Kim-Thao or anyone from B.A.N.G., this is your chance to connect and be a part of the Philly Fringe Festival! I recieved an email reminder about the first meet up:

This Thursday, the 20th, we will have our first design meetup at the PNA office, from 6PM-8PM. We are located at 251 South Camac Street, 19107 (between 12th and 13th on Spruce).

Bring your ideas, crafts materials, and your most outlandish accessories– be ready to create! Remember, we will provide the actual clothing. Bring your friends– we have a shortage on male models!

We have also just signed on to GreenFest Philly for Sunday, September 13. PNA will have a booth there, and will also be participating in the GreenFest fashion show. Additionally, for all interested artists, select works will be featured in the AxD gallery for a 2010 show.

I hope to see you all there!

To our surprise, there was a very nicely designed treehouse-type exhibit set to open the following day… I figured I’d take some pictures, because lord knows I hadn’t been aware of it and it looks super cool. I think anyone who played Myst back in the day (side note: did you know that they made an iPhone compatible version of Myst for six bucks? My mind is blown) will get some delightful deja vu.

All pictures by Emily G!

You can go in the giant nest AND you can climb on the rope nets, which is something I have been been dying to do since I aged out of the ones in King Arthur’s Court in Cedar Point 13 years ago.

And if you’re coming back via Broad Street, keep an eye out for the Beury Building at Broad and Erie, although it’s hard to miss. Inga Saffron once described it as “a lavishly sculpted 14-story tower that stands like an emaciated crack addict over the crossroads of Broad Street and Erie and Germantown Avenues.” Seriously, what’s the holdup on this lady’s Pulitzer, eh? The Beury Building is the canvas for one of the more impressive/juvenile pieces of graffiti in town:

Words to live by.

So I tend to go out of town every once in a while during the summer. Unfortunately, not watering your plants for four days to a week and a half is not good for them at all.

There are a variety of self-watering planters for sale, but they either tend to be too small to hold big veggies or too expensive for me to get more than one. But the internet always provides.

There’s a royal ton of schematics for self-watering planters out there from various local-farming advocates, so I sort of cobbled a few of them together based on what what I already had and what I could get for free (I’m friends with a lot of science people who have an infinite supply of 5-gallon buckets and people who buy the big plastic bins of kitty litter, for example, so those are what I used. If you have a lot of plastic rectangle storage bins left over from college, I would use those).

I couldn’t find a step-by-step picture book-type explanation for idiots, though, because I do best with projects when I’m not left to improvise, so I decided to make one. It’s a slightly more complicated than “one bucket in another bucket,” but that’s the basis. It’s eventually gonna look like this (if it were made of of crappy neon lines):

The bottom bucket’s job is to hold water. It has a drainage hole in the side so that the water level never rises above the soil in the top bucket, cuz that will drown the roots. The wicking cup (just a classic red solo cup cut full of holes, in my case) is full of soil and is a bridge between the top and bottom buckets. Physics (or something) will slowly draw the water up from the bottom bucket through the cup as the top dries out, so you can leave it unwatered for a few days and it’ll be fine, plus you can’t overwater it. You refill the reservoir through the watering tube sticking out the top. Simple enough? Well, here’s how you do it.

YOU WILL NEED:

• two five-gallon containers (five gallons is pretty much the minimum for growing big veggies like tomatoes)
• a drill OR a nail and a lot of patience
• about two feet of rubber tubing about an inch in diameter
• EITHER a piece of copper tube about an inch in diameter (you can get these in the plumbing section of the hardware store) OR a 1″ hole saw drill bit
• a plastic cup with a base diameter of about 2″
• EITHER a piece of copper tube about two inches in diamter OR a 2″ hole saw drill bit
• A plastic garbage bag
• an exacto knife or scissors
• potting mix
• seeds or seedlings

OK, so you've got a top bucket and a bottom bucket. The top bucket's base is going to get one big hole for the solo cup wicking device, one medium hole for the watering tube and a whole bunch of small holes for drainage. The bottom bucket only gets one small hole in its side for drainage. I'm painting my bottom buckets yellow, but this is only necessary if they're visible and you have pissy neighbors

For the top bucket: the copper tube gets heated up to poke a hole for the water tube

Stack your buckets, then measure how long the tube needs to be to reach the bottom

Unstack the buckets, and start heating up the large copper tube to make the large hole in the middle of the top bucket for the solo cup wicking thing

Now drill the base of the top bucket full of lots of evenly-spaced holes.

OK, top bucket, you're done for the moment.

Stack the buckets again, because you need to figure out where the top bucket's base is resting so you can drill a little drainage hole in the bottom bucket right below that so the soil won't actually ever be IN the water, just sucking it up through a plastic cup. It occurs to me now that it would be easier to just stick a ruler in the big hole. But what I did was measure how much of the top bucket was sticking out...

...then measure that distance minus about a quarter inch up from the base to mark the spot

This picture was taken before I located my drill under some stuff in the broom closet. I recommend using a drill, as poking a bunch of holes in plastic buckets with nails heated over a burner takes a really long time, makes your apartment smell really bad and probably also gives you cancer.

Solo cup, my old friend

Cut four vertical slits around the cup

Yup, four.

Pokin' some holes, pokin' some holes

Cut through the top brim of the cup and curl it up so it's more tube-ish than cup-ish

Tuck the cup into the hole so the base of the cup touches the bottom of the outside bucket

Dirt time! Take them wherever you want to keep them, they are going to be heavy

Pack the cup full of dirt first, then fill up the bucket and plant your seedling

Water it from the top this one time to get everything in order, but after this just pour water into the tube with a funnel

Happy plants!

One thing I forgot to take pictures of: cut a piece of garbage bag a little bigger than the circumference of the top bucket. Cut an X for the plant to fit through and an X for the water tube to fit through, then fasten the plastic around the top like a lid with the seedling and water tube poking out. This prevent the water from evaporating as quickly and keeps bad bugs out.

OK, I didn’t just forget to take pictures. I forgot to do it. But I recommend that you do it.

I have kind of failed at my project of growing plants from seeds in my apartment. Sad face. I’ve accepted that there’s not enough light for them to grow up strong, and furthermore I have a tendency to go out of town for a couple days and not want to be that “Oh, uh, can you maybe come over and water my plants this weekend? I”ll bake you cookies!” girl.

So I went to one measly wedding in Southern Virginia and that basically signed my already-sickly seedlings’ death warrants. Sorry, guys. Sun rolling high, sapphire sky, great and small on endless round, etc. If it’s any consolation, I feel really bad about it.

Anyway, I got another batch of seeds going which are doing much better because I can put them outside where the sun is. But just in case I mess those up too (and there’s a high probability that I will), I decided to hedge my bets and headed over to Greensgrow, the 3/4 acre urban farm post-industrial land smack in the middle of Kensington. I had heard many good things, and it’s also the only decent-sized nursery not out in the burbs or down by IKEA. From their website:

Greensgrow is THE nationally recognized leader in urban farming (don’t just take our word for it…) and is open to the public from early spring through Thanksgiving. A small but dedicated staff runs a multifaceted operation, including a nursery, a farm market, and a Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) program, proving that abandoned land is only abandoned if we choose to leave it that way.

Their CSA, in which you pick up a bunch of produce grown on the farm every week, filled up way back in March, but the farm stand will be opening May 28 if you’re in the mood for some locally-grown stuff; and of course there’s tons of pretty flowers and grasses and little teenager trees. I thought I’d post some pictures I took, because I had heard a lot of press about this place but had no idea what an urban farm actually looked like (hint: pretty big, with lots of bright colors).

And for those of you who don’t live in the area but visit occasionally, it’s a 15-minute walk from the Berks stop and about two blocks from Memphis Taproom. The address 2501 Cumberland St. kind of delayed my going for a while; I’m not super familiar with Kensington street names, and all street names I’m unfamiliar with sound way far away to my lazy ears. Placing it near a landmark removed my “But it’s faaaaaaaaaar!” excuse, and perhaps it will remove yours.

They’ve been around since 1998 and have been doing the farm stand since 2002. But before you shout OLD!, I’d just like to say what the heck, my friend who recently bought a house less than a mile from Greensgrow had never been there accompanied me yesterday and is now in love. Here’s a couple of pictures, more after the jump.

You can see rowhouses all around...

...on every side

I went with Mr. Stripey tomatoes because that's what my cat growing up was named, seemed as good a reason as any rational ones I could think of

Growing foodstuffs for the CSA

My visit took place during what seems like the one sunny hour of the past week, but it was definitely ominous

Cheery checkout counter

That's way less than a box of strawberries

Bearded dudes at work

I wish I could buy all of these and put them in my room

Veggie starts!

Hummus: slightly less expensive than compost

The corner of Cumberland and Almond streets

My selections: three eggplants, three tomatoes (heirloom because why the hell not, they cost the same), two strawberries I have no idea how to grow, parsley and basil. We'll see how fast I ruin these bright-eyed young plants.

In that cute Swedish Chef way IKEA has of mashing together languages, the line is called SOLIG and SUNNAN.

Interestingly enough, this appears to be the first wave of a larger IKEA move to make green technology as affordable as they’ve made somewhat flimsy modern furniture. IKEA pledged $77 million over the next five years to investments in green startups last August; the resulting products (which will focus on solar panels, alternative light sources, eco-friendly materials, energy efficiency, and water saving and purification systems) will then be sold in IKEA stores.

This is seriously neat. The major thing standing standing in the way of mainstreaming alternate forms of energy is the affordability and the perception as it being a concern mostly of people who wouldn’t dreeeeeeeeeam of buying their groceries anywhere but Whole Foods. The absolute best way to get the ball rolling is to get the tech into IKEA and Target and WalMart, and onto people’s desks.

SUNNAN desk lamp, $19.95

via MoCoLoco

You, too, can own two halves of a bottle!

Urban Outfitters, in their aggravating way of selling expensive prefab DIY kits, now has a $58 kit for making votive holders/cups/vases out of glass bottles.

I wasn’t a huge fan of the example they gave of a finished product (see right), which is two bottle halves that frankly look as if one misstep might have you asking “WHY SO SERIOUS?” But I have been wanting to make some bell-jar terrariums for growing herbs lately (that may well be another post), and bell jars are expensive, so if there’s a DIY to make what I need, all the better!

But is the word here really DIY? I usually am a sucker for projects in which you get to use chemicals and fire, and the Urban Outfitters kit has both. But I cannot abide pre-assembled kits that treat the DIY aspect as a bonus that should be priced accordingly, as if the added sex appeal you get from being able to say, “Oh, this half a bottle you’re drinking out of? I cut it myself!” is worth that extra thirty bucks. Dammit, you Do It Yourself to save the money it would take to pay Someone Else to Do It! You’ll never live like common people!  You’ll never do what common people do!

Whew, sorry there. So the picture wasn’t appealing, the price wasn’t appealing, but a touch o’ the google and several ways to actually DIY with nothing more than string, rubbing alcohol, matches, a bucket of cold water and sandpaper turned up. I chose this video for its cheerful soundtrack.

I would seriously advise that you make sure you’ve got all-cotton string if you attempt this; five years of girl scouts taught me that string with plastic inside to strengthen it smells real bad when on fire.

The Urban picture was not that appealing, but it seems worth it if I could end up with something like these:

Images ganked from Green Wine Bottles and, uh, Weddingbee.

The art school moved to North Philadelphia this semester after a 1997 decision was made to combine the main and Tyler campuses to stop overcrowding at Tyler. Many Tyler students were excited about the move and hoped that the new location would allow for easier access to Old City’s galleries and other city cultural institutions.

The University spent $55 million dollars on the new building, hiring famed Houston architect Carlos Jiménez. However, Saffron was not impressed with the completed work. She writes:

The $55 million building provides students with generous, light-filled and highly functional spaces. There are even several poetic moments that elevate the architecture above Temple’s usual. But this enormous, sprawling building, whose exterior resembles a run-of-the-mill high school, fails to forge a desperately needed sense of place.

Much of this is due to Temple’s failure to think more than one step ahead. Despite Tyler’s importance to the university, Temple dumped what should have been a statement building at the far end of the campus universe, plopping it down seemingly at random, so that its main entrance looks out onto the dumpsters for the Biology-Life Sciences Building. Similarly, the residents of Yorktown are now stuck looking at the butt end of Tyler, since its sizable loading dock looms over their immaculate, middle-class enclave, an oasis in North Philadelphia. [via Philly.com]

Brides (and grooms) to be, listen up: If the thought of drowning in a sea of white tulle, butt bows and sequins makes you want to elope in Vegas, Unbridaled is here to help. This expo focuses on local, handmade, environmentally responsible and alternative solutions to wedding planning. Walking down the aisle in hemp might piss off your mom, but really, isn’t that half the fun?

Sat., Jan. 10, 10am-4pm. $12-$20. Crane Arts Building, 1400 N. American St. 267.269.8237.

If you’re like me, you have some issues because you’re white and privileged. In the deep recesses of your mind, you feel sort of guilty for living in America and getting to worry about being fat.

Alleviate the guilt, my friends! There’s an amazing variety of shoes you can add to your Chanukah or Christmas list, all of which are different levels of eco-friendly, cruelty free and fair trade. Rock these $90 boots from Simple Shoes and when somebody compliments them, you can say, “Oh thanks, they’re made from hemp and recycled inner tubes under high human rights standards.”

Deal with the newfound guilt of being self-righteous about your consumption choices on your own time!

*Written by Becca Trabin