everydaytrash

Today’s the day when Treehugger has promised to start posting the five finalists from their inspired Umbrella Inside Out contest. The idea is to make good use of all those umbrellas thrown away due to poor contruction and turn them into either a better umbrella or fashion item. Either way, the winner will be shown at an ethical fashion show in Paris.

Sidenote: When I was little, my mother read an article about a man who went around collecting broken umbrellas after rain storms and made them into kites. She got us some kite-making books from the library and the next time it rained, we walked around the neighborhood picking discarded umbrellas out of corner trash baskets. I made a bat kite from a black umbrella. She made a more beautiful, but less flyable red box kite. I don’t remember how long it took us, but I do remember many afternoons in the park flying our creations. Also, I remember the pride I felt as a child explaining to anyone who asked that we had made our nifty kites ourselves from things we picked out of the trash.

Tags: umbrellas, zero waste

This entry was posted on Monday, September 11, 2006 at 10:46 am and is filed under Artistic Trash, Garblogging. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.