Y'all, Start Saving Those Buttons!

I've been looking for the site where I found these incredible pieces to credit the artist- Haven't found it yet.

.....

Sea Creatures!

What fine construction.

Octopus, spider, you name it. Skraptacular followers, start saving your buttons! If you have little ones, you can color sort them so they're ready to go by the time school resumes in September : (

Giraffes take over the garden

Saturday, June 5, 10 AM-3PM, Hike the Heights from RING Garden to Highbridge Park
This activity is more about community and (re)discovering our neighborhood. Yes We Can Inwood will once again participate in the 6th annual Hike the Heights event whose goal is to invigorate public spaces by bringing more visitors to northern Manhattan parks and to inspire young and old people to be more physically active.

We will gather at the RING Garden (Dyckman Street b/w Broadway & Seaman Avenue) at 10:00 a.m. The hike will start promptly at 10:30am when we will walk east on Dyckman towards 10th Avenue where we will enter Highbridge Park and then hike up through the park to the water tower. Hikers will be coming from 5 different starting points in northern Manhattan. All hikes will converge at the Highbridge Recreation Center on 173rd Street and Amsterdam Avenue. A hugecommunity celebration at Highbridge Park will follow with food, games, activities and performances. To watch a clip of last year's event and learn more about the event, visit: www.thegiraffenyc.org . There are also some great photos of last year's event on our website.

The event is organized by The CLIMB project (City Life Is Moving Bodies), part of the Center for Youth Violence Prevention at the Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health.

Hope to see you in the park!

Skraptacular will be participating at this event! We'll be collaborating on another Skraptacular giraffe and I mean SKRAPTACULAR. I plan to bring some puppet-makers and sculptors to inspire and guide us with their expertise. Below is my first day at making the giraffes. Thanks Amy D. for helping me today and also for encouraging Skraptacular to take part in this fabulous and meaningful project! Once the giraffe is built, students at Muscota New School will decorate her with words and images relating to health, sustainability and global warming.

Legs are still looking too short. The more length and muscle the giraffe gets, the shorter my cutain becomes. This giraffe deserves long legs and healthy muscles.

Ooh the plastic bottle hooves are looking good!
I'm having trouble believing this box will end up looking like a giraffe, But I trust you, Amy.

Polystyrene is the WORST but at least we're saving it from going in the landfill. We will paper mache over the polystyrene so the students are not compelled to pick away at it like they do with their polystyrene lunch treys that, by the way, every single NYC public school uses, amounting to 850,000 treys per day! A tangent I couldn't ignore, back to the giraffes....

Yes, there she is...... I see her! Next, she needs reeeally long eyelashes-made from plastic bottles, of course.

As you can see," The Landscape of No Away " is in Full Bloom.

Now they're prohibiting us from reusing? For some, this could get really confusing. What the H-E-double toothpicks?

Tell them to go #@!% brush their teeth!

What is this, vole, mole or platypus?

This innocent creature was either dragged in by my brother Chris or Maggie the cat, they're both denying it.

Elvis made from Trash - by Patti Pippen a.k.a the Critter Mother

The Critter Mother has a blog if you like this blog you will be interested in what she has to say. Here's an incredibly creative lady with a lot of wisdom and facts about our perishing planet.

http://littercritters.blogspot.com/

Take back the Tap!

Did you know, 200,000 barrels of oil are used per day to produce 1 days worth of plastic products in this country alone?( Thanks Sprout for the data) How sick is that?! Here's one way to reduce our plastic consumption...... don't fall prey to manufactured demand. Have a listen to my hero, Annie Leonard. She doesn't get depressed, she investigates and informs us all on smart consumerism.

Two Things Every Kitchen Needs

A collection jar and a compost bucket......

Composting is an essential component to regenerating our soils. Where does your food come from? Is it part of the problem, or part of the solution? Each year the world loses an estimated 83 billion tons of soil. What does this mean for food production and what can we do about it?

It's a week to remember -- or better yet, forget. Who could have imagined such a confluence of terrible, horrible, no-good, very-bad events, rounding up what has to be the most disheartening "Earth Month" ever?