This is the first tour for the Newport Beach Green Home.

As you can see, this project is still in the early stages of construction.

Man, have you ever seen more beautiful framing?  Seriously, this stuff is a work of art.  Almost a shame to cover it up with drywall.  Of course, if we didn’t, I sorta wouldn’t have a job, would I?

Lots of people showed up.

Here is John Steed, the builder/general contractor, telling an admiring crowd about that awesome framing.  We also had Laura Minott Sanders, the project manager from Jeff Jeanette Architects, the homeowners Wayne and Shannon, and yours truly there to explain our respective parts of the project.  We all got to answer a lot of good questions, which is always fun.

Here is my little contribution to the tour.  A table full of shiny, pretty things!  Samples are so much fun, no?

Oh, and you know how I was just going on about how fantastic the framing was?  Well, if you thought that was great, check out this TEMPORARY staircase.

Now that’s a topflight flight of stairs!

By the way, we were actually having a debate about what to cover that adjacent wall with.  Although the solution is at hand, I thought it also might be fun to see what my readers could come up with.  So here are the parameters:

The staircase will be made of steel with strand bamboo treads.  The flooring will also be strand bamboo, in a medium tone.  We are looking for a material that is durable, cleanable, sustainable (of course), and has a great visual impact – without being too busy.  There will be a lot of light coming from a window wall above.

So, get out your thinking caps, and see what you can come up with!

To find out more about this project, visit the Newport Green Home website, or follow the project on Facebook.

If you are in the SoCal area in November, you couldn’t find a better thing to do than go see The Dunnage Show at Inheritance.  A collaboration of all the members of L.A. Box Collective, the exhibit will showcase what happened to 12 tons of dunnage – headed to the landfill – when this creative group of master woodworkers got hold of it.  Expect amazing pieces of furniture and accessories, if their previous work is anything to go by!

Place:  Inheritance – 8055 Beverly Boulevard, Los Angeles, CA 90048-4517  ph (323) 658-6756

Date: Opening reception November 3rd, 2011 from 7-10PM

RSVP: BoxCoEvents@gmail.com

Here is the information:

Guided Tour and Open House
Saturday, October 22nd, from 10am to 12pm

Tour a LEED for Homes registered custom home in Newport Beach while it’s still under construction with exposed studs. Builder John Steed of Maverick Home Builders, Project Manager Laura Sanders of Jeannette Architects in Long Beach, Interior Designer Rachel Hulan of Path Design, Consultant Evan Little of Permaculture Properties and other design team members as well as USGBC-OC volunteers will be on hand to answer questions and lead two scheduled tours through this cutting edge home. Targeted certification level is Platinum. Targeted certification level is Platinum. Light refreshments will be served.

10:15am – 1st guided tour begins
11:15am – 2nd guided tour begins

Parking:
Street parking is limited. Try parking at Grant Howard Park off Heliotrope and 5th.

Cost:
$5 Students
$5 USGBC-OC Members
$15 Non-Members

Registration:
Tickets are limited, so make sure to reserve your spot early. Contact the USGBC-OC chapter at 714-832-3616 for more information or go to our website at www.usgbc-oc.org to register.

Thanks for visiting, and hope to see you there!

Rachel

Dear Readers,

I’ll be attending BlogHer ’11 tomorrow.  If you are also attending, please let me know.  I would love to meet you!

Thanks for visiting,

Rachel

I’m off to see what there is to see at Dwell on Design today.  Love that there is a design show with such buzz in Southern California again.  Wonder what they’ll have on show this time?

I’ll be posting all the fun stuff I see on my Twitter account while I’m there, in case you can’t wait till next week to hear about it!

Have a wonderful weekend everyone!

Here’s how they describe the contest:

Dwell and method, two arbiters of style that aim for pride of place on your shelves, dare you to defy us with your concepts and creations for upcycling, recycling, rethinking, and deconstructing—beginning with your empty method product bottles. This design contest is about celebrating the effervescence of the everyday, because we think real creativity is about taking a second look, and breathing new life into the old. We’re looking for imaginative, innovative and inspiring concepts and creations that give method product bottles and packages a sexy new lease on life. Whether it’s an empty method bottle that now holds bouquets of blooms, a collage created from thousands of pieces of deconstructed method materials, or a conceptual rendering for future method fish bowls, we want you to submit a photo or rendering that shows how you’d move from method-everyday to method-extravagant, and we’ll shower you with fabulous prizes.

The Grand Prize is $300 worth of Method products, so put on your thinking caps and see what awesomeness you can come up with!  You have until June 30th.

Oh, and if you do submit an entry, make sure you tell us all about it in the comments below.  We’ll be rooting for you!

If you are in Southern California this Friday or Saturday, you should head on over to AltBuild in Santa Monica.  Some favorite folks of mine will be there, including The L.A. Box Collective, Harding Construction and Sustainable Solutions (along with their ReUse Haus), Eric Corey Freed, and Tondro Green Art.

I’ll be checking things out tomorrow morning, so if you see a daffy looking red-head wandering the hall be sure to say hi!

After gathering at the lovely French General for the workshop, we all carpooled over to the park where our dyeing experience would take place.

Once at the park we got a delightful and informative overview of the history of woad dyeing from Denise Lambet, who flew all the way from the South of France just to create a legion of new woad addicts dyers.  After regaling us with stories of previous woad workshop students stripping down to their skivvies in an attempt to have just ONE more garment to dunk in the vats, she proceeded to explain how the process worked, and what we would need to do to have a successful dyeing experience.  Then we got to work.

We were each provided with a bucket full of water and a stick, and told we needed to get our items thoroughly wet – NO air bubbles allowed!  Air is not your friend when you are dyeing with woad. Not only will air bubbles in your fabric block the dye from bonding with it, they also cause the woad to activate to a blue color prematurely, rendering the batch of woad weaker.

In case you didn’t look at the previous post, here is what a fresh batch of woad dye looks like.  Delicious, no?

After a brief moment of hesitancy, we all started cautiously dipping our first textiles into the woad.

Then we progressively got bolder… 

Double, double toil and trouble; Fire burn, and cauldron bubble.

Ahem.  OK, maybe not THAT bold.

Pretty soon we were plunging our hands in as well as our fabrics.  Thank goodness we were wearing gloves!

Well, most of us were anyway.  A few hardy souls decided to go into full on woad mode, leaving their hands a lovely shade of blue that will last them for weeks.  Badge of honor I guess.

That is some yarn being dyed.  I would love to see something made from it!

Sometimes, strange “creatures” would float to the surface of a vat.  Any guesses what that is?

As soon as you dyed something, you needed to hang it up so the initial yellowish color could oxygenate to the final lovely blue.  You could watch it happen as you ran to the line.  Pretty cool.

Here are a few of the items I dyed.  The depth of blue depended on the strength of the batch (they varied over the 6 or so vats available), the type of fiber, and the time you left it in the dye.

Soon the drying lines started to fill up, so they had to put up more line…

and more line…

until we ran out, and we started to use the rock walls.

This is one of those times when I wish I had an extreme wide angle lens, because I want to badly so show you how there was blue EVERYWHERE in sight.  It was almost 360 degrees of blue.  So beautiful!

People were dyeing everything from yarn, to lace, to small tablecloths, to these sneakers.  After lunch, I only had one item left to dye, and once I was done with that I still felt the itch.  So I did exactly what Denise Lambet predicted…

I took the clothes off my back and plopped them in!  That used to be an oatmeal colored organic cotton sweater I’m standing behind.  Now it is a gorgeous shade of dusky blue.  If there hadn’t been a little bit of a chill in the air (not to mention a few men folk around) I might have been tempted to see what else I had on to toss in a vat.

All in all, it was an amazing afternoon.   The wonderful folks at French General are hoping to offer this workshop again next year.  I’m not sure if I can wait!  That blue is so pretty, I want to dye everything in sight.  My sheets,… my curtains,… my towels,… my cat,….  Oh dear…

Hello, my name is Rachel Hulan, and I have a woad addiction.

Bet you would too!

Woad comes from the common Isatis tinctoria plant.  It has been in use as a pigment and dye since Egyptian times, and possibly longer.  Many have thought that the blue pigment the Picts (early Scottish tribes) used to color their skin blue was woad, although there is some debate about that.  Oddly, for a dye that has been around for so long, it is surprisingly difficult to extract.  Because of that, the cultivation and processing were controlled by wealthy “woad masters” throughout much of European history.  Until Napoleonic times, the extraction method took a full year and a half, and involved a long fermentation in urine filled vats.  I can’t even begin to imagine the smell!  And not just any pee would do.  In order to have the proper ph level. it had to be human male pee.  Thus the preponderance of taverns near where the woad was produced.  Cheers!

image via woad.org.uk

Even once Napoleon’s chemists had figured out a quicker (and hopefully less odoriferous) method, so as to supply his army with blue cloth, the extraction was still a laborious process.  Above are workers hand rolling “woad balls” in order to put them out to dry.  Unfortunately, the heavy manual labor required to extract the dye made it fall out of favor, and the last woad production ended in England in the early part of the 20th century.  Happily, some dedicated people, like those at Bleu de Pastel de  Lectoure , have been working hard, to not only revive the art, but to improve upon it and make it a commercially viable, natural, alternative to synthetic dyes.

image via woad.org.uk

Here is a contemporary woad ball, from which you can see dripping one of the most interesting aspects of woad.  It isn’t actually blue.  Well, at least not to start.  The dye begins as a sickly greenish yellow.

Here is an image I took of one of the vats we used last weekend.  Looks SO appealing, doesn’t it?  And by the way, although no pee is involved in the process these days, the smell is still a bit on the strong side.  At this point in the game, I was not feeling quite so enthused.

However, if you notice the color of the bubble sludge forming at the top, you will see a lovely blue color.  This is the amazing thing with woad.  It needs oxygen to turn blue!  I’ll tell you more about that in my second installment next week.

Woad can be used as either a dye or a pigment, and it is light fast, unlike indigo.  That makes it a really useful substitute for synthetic pigments used in everything from printing to car paint.  Above you can see a comparison of indigo (the darker blue on the left) and woad pigment powder.  The color of woad truly is unique, and in many ways I now prefer it to indigo.

So now that you know a little bit about woad, I thought I would give you a peek at how the French General workshop day started.

As everyone arrived at the shop, we were each greeted warmly by owner Kaari Meng.  Although I came by myself, I instantly felt comfortable and amongst friends (of the “I just met you but you seem cool” sort).  There were tables upon tables of delightful linens, fabric scraps and sundries, all for sale and ready for dyeing.  I had picked out a few items from home to dye, but couldn’t resist getting a few extra things to try out too.  Here is what I planned to dye:

Doilies???  Yep, I bought some doilies, and you know what?  I am SO glad I did, because they were some of my favorite pieces once they were dyed.  You can also see a white cotton blouse, a bundle of fabric scraps, and a bit of the two tablecloths I brought along.

Check back Monday for An Ode to Woad – Part 2, in which I discover that I now have a serious addiction problem.

You remember that lovely house in Costa Mesa, CA I showed you on Monday?  Well, I’m going to be giving a talk there on Saturday, October 30th, from 10:00 – 11:30 AM, called The Art of Handmade in Green Interior Design.  There is no charge to attend.  Here is the description:

Come explore the role of handmade, artisan crafted furnishings in green interior design projects, and how you can integrate those ideas into your own homes. We will look at why items made by hand are inherently sustainable, and provide a much better investment over time. Special emphasis will be given to learning about the handwoven, vegetable dyed rugs, and the artisan dining table currently at the Cecil Place residence. A Q&A will follow the presentation.

I will be showing a bunch of materials and furnishings that are handmade, as well as images of artisan produced goods and a list of resources and contacts to find out more.  If you have even a tenth of the passion for the subject as I do, then you won’t want to miss what I hope is the first of many presentation on the subject.

If you would like to attend, please click here to RSVP. *** Notice***  Unfortunately, this event has been postponed.  We will be announcing a new date soon.

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