![DIY / repurposing idea du jour:
Old boot screwed onto a tree or a fence = new bird house.
For additional bird house, feeder, and other bird-related posts, browse through this subset of the Unconsumption archive.
[Photo spotted on Facebook here, thanks to friend Jim Mitchem. Source apparently is Livesay Photography. (Kudos to photographers who add watermarks to their photos!)]](http://24.media.tumblr.com/47ce0672717594a3ee5f0ba862bd9912/tumblr_mhag1wVdeP1qzv12bo1_400.jpg)
DIY / repurposing idea du jour:
Old boot screwed onto a tree or a fence = new bird house.
For additional bird house, feeder, and other bird-related posts, browse through this subset of the Unconsumption archive.
[Photo spotted on Facebook here, thanks to friend Jim Mitchem. Source apparently is Livesay Photography. (Kudos to photographers who add watermarks to their photos!)]
Wellies have become as much a part of festival culture as the music, beer and straw hats. And, just like festival tents, they tend to get left behind in the muddy field at the end of the weekend, forgotten, sodden and anonymous.
So one guy decided to collect them up and do something good with them. Steffan Lemke-Elms set up Festival Reboot, a company that collects, cleans and reuses these unwanted wellington boots….
Once cleaned, the tops get chopped off leaving a clog like shoe at the bottom and a strip of welly material…. The rubbery material gets upcycled in either a beer holder, a notebook or a bracelet.. Steffan sells these in order to raise money to send the bottom part (the cleaned, paired Welly Clogs) out to the slums in Nairobi and Nakuru in Kenya.
(via Do The Green Thing: Wellies are for life, not just for Glastonbury)
Nike has launched a football cleat the company is heralding as the “lightest, fastest, most environmentally-friendly production boot the company has ever made.” The lightweight shoe weighs in at a mere 160 grams and features recycled and renewable materials throughout its body
The laces, lining and tongue of the shoe are made from a minimum of 70% reused plastics, including recycled water bottles and polyester, and the traction-plate on the shoes is made from 50% renewable Pebax® Renu, a plant-based material composed of 97% castor beans. …The Nike GS are also chemical free, and the Kangaroo leather in the shoes are made with 35% less carbon emissions than traditional material.
(via Nike Introduces Sneakers Made Of Beans & Recycled Bottles - PSFK)
Earlier on Unconsmption: The USA basketball team’s Nike-produced uniforms are made from recycled plastic bottles.
Waste not, want not
‘Second-hand becomes second-foot with Worn Again’s sports shoes crafted from charity store coats, military parachutes, prison blankets, car seat scrap leather, old towels and recycled rubber. At least 1.3% of the production cost is also set aside to balance carbon emissions.’
Via Design Indaba
Vintage cobbler’s molds, delightfully repurposed; image via Tara Sloggett.
(via Remodelista)
See also: Jean jacket repurposed as a planter.
A new project by recent Eindhoven grad Eugenia Morpurgo challenges consumers to take matters into their own hands by empowering them to maintain their canvas flats with a kit of replacement parts.
Morpurgo’s Repair It Yourself shoes snap together and come apart easily so that the insole and outsole can be replaced. Three separate kits equip users to mend the uppers by darning, patching, or felting.
According to the designer:
“Shoes are one of those products that, with the rise of consumerism and mass production, evolved drastically from a completely repairable object; and the active social-economical structure that existed around shoe repair is slowly disappearing… . This project brings back in the hand of the consumers tools and knowledge for repairing.”
(via Almost Genius: A Modular Kit Of Shoes, Which You Can Fix Yourself | Co.Design)
More on mending in earlier Unconsumption posts here.
Another Unconsumption Christmas tree, this one made from recycled Converse to promote Nike’s “Reuse-A-Shoe” program, which collects old shoes to grind down into playgrounds and game courts.
The Converse Tree is part of the holiday decorations at the Converse flagship store in SoHo.
“In the Amazon, the indigenous inhabitants used to paint the soles of their feet with natural latex to make walking through the jungle easier during the rainy season. Inspired by this ancient cradle to cradle design, the 01M OneMoment shoe line was born in Spain this year. 01M is a multi-functional shoe, or rubber sock more like it, made from 100% biodegradable raw materials.”
via TreeHugger
![gq:
A Midafternoon Shoe Story
Or: The Greatest Thrift-Store Find Ever. Via Friend-of-GQ Andrew Romano:
Don’t give up on good shoes.
While attending a friend’s wedding in the lovely city of York, England, I stumbled upon a pair of bespoke John Lobb shoes in a local thrift shop. They were my size. They were my style. I knew that they were far nicer than any shoes I’d ever owned. Or had been, in their original state. And even though new, bespoke Lobbs sell for $4,300—these are, after all, some of the finest handcrafted foot coverings on earth—they were only $50. Unfortunately, they weren’t really in office-ready condition, but I bought them anyway, hoping I could find a way to restore them.
I did, as you can see from the before and after photographs above.
Through Styleforum, a shoe aficionado named Nate offered to work on the uppers, and, being a rookie in these matters (and wanting to learn from a master), I took him up on it. His process consisted of a) buffing with the inside of a sock, which removed “virtually all of the buildup on the surface”; b) applying a layer of Crema Alpina “to clean up anything [he] missed,” at which point they looked “100% better,” with “almost all the creasing… flattened out”; c) giving them a go with Saphir Renovateur to “cut through some of the stubborn old polish”; and d) applying a little Saphir Medaille d’Or brown wax to the microcreases to further try to dissolve any remaining black gunk.
He did a remarkable job. As you can see, the Lobbs do indeed look 100% better, or more. The leather is remarkably resilient; in most places, it could pass as brand-new. There’s still some slight creasing near the front of the shoes, and the black polish that was ground into those creases hasn’t completely vanished. But these are much, much better than presentable, which was my original goal. I think they look fantastic.
Next time I plan to do the job myself. All it took was some quality products, a little know-how, and a lot of elbow grease. As I said: don’t give up on good shoes.](http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lugpgfcwqP1qztcnqo1_400.jpg)
gq:
A Midafternoon Shoe Story
Or: The Greatest Thrift-Store Find Ever. Via Friend-of-GQ Andrew Romano:
Don’t give up on good shoes.
While attending a friend’s wedding in the lovely city of York, England, I stumbled upon a pair of bespoke John Lobb shoes in a local thrift shop. They were my size. They were my style. I knew that they were far nicer than any shoes I’d ever owned. Or had been, in their original state. And even though new, bespoke Lobbs sell for $4,300—these are, after all, some of the finest handcrafted foot coverings on earth—they were only $50. Unfortunately, they weren’t really in office-ready condition, but I bought them anyway, hoping I could find a way to restore them.
I did, as you can see from the before and after photographs above.
Through Styleforum, a shoe aficionado named Nate offered to work on the uppers, and, being a rookie in these matters (and wanting to learn from a master), I took him up on it. His process consisted of a) buffing with the inside of a sock, which removed “virtually all of the buildup on the surface”; b) applying a layer of Crema Alpina “to clean up anything [he] missed,” at which point they looked “100% better,” with “almost all the creasing… flattened out”; c) giving them a go with Saphir Renovateur to “cut through some of the stubborn old polish”; and d) applying a little Saphir Medaille d’Or brown wax to the microcreases to further try to dissolve any remaining black gunk.
He did a remarkable job. As you can see, the Lobbs do indeed look 100% better, or more. The leather is remarkably resilient; in most places, it could pass as brand-new. There’s still some slight creasing near the front of the shoes, and the black polish that was ground into those creases hasn’t completely vanished. But these are much, much better than presentable, which was my original goal. I think they look fantastic.
Next time I plan to do the job myself. All it took was some quality products, a little know-how, and a lot of elbow grease. As I said: don’t give up on good shoes.
Here on the Unconsumption Tumblr we champion the idea of repairing things, or, as our friends at Do The Green Thing like to say, “stick with what you got.”
This story in the Houston Chronicle (related video above) about a Houston-based shoe craftsman earning the shoe repair industry’s highest honor [from the Shoe Service Institute of America (SSIA)] made me think I should call attention to SSIA’s Web site — it’s a resource for not only for repair, but for choosing quality footwear in the first place.
Via its site, the SSIA — motto: “If the shoe fits, repair it” — provides information about shoe care and the names of repair professionals throughout the U.S. The site also features an ”ask the experts” forum where questions, such as “Can dog-chewed women’s shoes be fixed?,” can be submitted and discussed. Check it out.
(Disclosure: I’m a fan of both repairing things and Shoe Savers, the recipient of the SSIA’s award and the business featured in the video and Houston Chronicle story. Shoe Savers has prolonged the life of three pairs of my favorite shoes!)
New Balance’s upcoming sneaker, newSKY, is partly made out of a material called Eco-fi, which is created using post-consumer plastic bottles. This is used for the upper of the new sneaker and it is manufactured from 95% PET plastic bottles, with eight bottles needed to make one pair. The plastic bottles are chopped into flakes and then synthetic fiber company Foss Manufacturing melts the flakes and molds them into fibers. These are then weaved together to create a strong and versatile polyester fabric.
Crazy cardboard craftsman Mark O’Brien uses cardboard boxes to create fun and colorful shoes. Mark says, “Shoes seem to work really well in cardboard. Because corrugated cardboard won’t flow and bend like leather or canvas it takes a lot of squashing and twisting to get it into shape, which seems to bring out the corrugated structure and chunky look of the material.” Fancy a pair?
