Making It

...ets. Provides step-by-step instructions for a wide range of projects, from building a 99-cent solar oven to making your own laundry soap to instructions for brewing beer. Making It is the go-to source for post-consumer living activities that are fun, inexpensive and eminently doable. Our goal in this book was to provide really stripped down, simple projects that use only inexpensive, easy to source materials. We also tried to use the same material...

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Build Your Own Furniture

...t of the plywood sheet once you cut it out? The same limitation applies to making furniture. Thankfully a generation of designers back in the 60s and 70s left a few highly useful and groovy how-to books on making your own suburban-workshop-modernist furniture with a humble 4 x 8 sheet of plywood. The amazing art/architecture collective Simparch tipped us off to the world of plywood modernism how-to books and we at Homegrown Evolution recommend the...

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Learn to Build with Adobe

...ee National Park, we’ll spend Sunday providing a condensed introduction to making and building with adobe brick. Our final two session this year will be on September 25 and October 23th. Register here, bring your friends, make some bricks, build a wall and have a beverage at Pappy and Harriet’s when you are done (beverage not included). Adobe Residency: Our first, month long Adobe Residency runs weekdays from October 24 through a series of progres...

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Our Rocket Stove

...we felt a certain pressure to keep up with the eco-Joneses. We started to build the base for one and then began to think about how often we would actually build a fire, especially considering that it has to burn for several hours before a cob oven gets hot enough to cook in. Also, where would we get the logs? And how good is it to burn such a fire and contribute to Los Angeles’ already smog choked air? Staring at the bricks we had scavenged to bu...

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Non-Toxic Cleaning for the Home

...l figure out how strong you like to use it.) It excels at removing mineral build up and killing mold. It also helps remove soap scum and soap build up. Vinegar has a strong scent, but once it dries, that scent goes, taking other scents with it, so it is an excellent deodorizer. Try wiping out the fridge with it. It is particularly good for deodorizing cat litter boxes. It can be used in the rinse cycle of the washing machine instead of fabric soft...

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