Category: Photography

Green Home: South Africa’s Source for Biodegradable Packaging

DO School Fellowship, Photography, Reviews, Trash to Treasure Festivals

A week ago I flew down to South Africa to help for a few days with this year’s edition of the Trash to Treasure Festivals. My dear friend and business partner Candice Mostert picked me up from Cape Town International Airport.

Before returning to the Green Park in Greyton we had to run a few errands including picking up all sorts of biodegradable goods from Green Home for usage at the Festival. Here are some shots from their store front in Ottery:

– Joseph Stodgel, 4/18/14

A Visit to the Red Hook Studio of Alfred Stadler

Photography, Reviews, Writing

I learned about Alfred just the morning I met him from my DO School Challenge Lab facilitator Scott Francisco of Pilot Projects. He encouraged me to reach out to Alfred in hopes that I might be able to use an industrial sewing machine to sew a whole load of disposable coffee cups together (as I am experimenting of various ways of upcycling them for our projects).

I left a message on Alfred’s voice mail that afternoon and he quickly got back to me and agreed to meet that evening. I took the F train down a ways to Red Hook from Dumbo and walked the few blocks to his studio near to the water’s edge near many a dock and storage yard. He buzzed me up into his work space – a big airy room with tall ceilings and all sorts of tools and materials covering the walls. He set his designs for a new backpack aside for a while to welcome and chat with me and quickly we were deep in a rich conversation about the predominant disposable lifestyle in New York.

He told me how much it ailed him to see materials so quickly used and thrown away, and spoke of his disdain for synthetic materials in general – all the plastics and polymers that poison organic systems and fly in the face of the natural aesthetics which he so deeply loved and respected. He went on to describe with relish some of the materials that he works with – hemp, cotton, flax, linen, jute, the magic fiber of wool, and of course… leather. He showed me a variety of the old-school tools that he uses on a regular basis, and spoke fondly of being able to take a few of them in a small backpack and make all sorts of things wherever he was.

It was an inspirational meeting and luckily we got to experiment a bit with some of the coffee cups as well. Check out some of Alfred’s top-notch hand made bags and other goods at https://www.alfredstadler.com

– Jo Stodgel 3/28/14

The DO School Visits The Hudson Company

DO School Fellowship, Photography, Writing

Several days ago the DO School fellows and Challenge Lab facilitator Scott Francisco took a short walk from the Made in NYC Media Center to the nearby Hudson Company in Dumbo, Brooklyn. The Company was founded by a man named Jamie Hammel who chose to apply his business education to the arts of fine woodworking and reclamation.

When he began his research on the subject, he discovered a small group of productive woodchucks who were deeply passionate about wood but lacked the business knowledge to work on a larger scale or with more mainstream clients and firms. In response he established his business to offer a platform for these fine woodworkers who were so diligently rescuing and upcycling old timbers from abandoned or condemned buildings such as old barns and tobacco mills.

I was pleasantly delighted and surprised to walk into the showroom, where a variety of woods hang, most of them samples of one of a kind “limited batches”, and some of them hundreds of years old. The company focuses mainly on flooring and interior design applications but shares the showroom with Mark Jupiter, a man and his crew who are making beautiful furniture with the woods that Jamie sources and processes at a mill 90 miles to the North of NYC. I look forward to visiting the mill one day with my brother James who is also a passionate woodworker and currently making furniture in Santa Fe, NM from reclaimed shipping pallets. Some of his past work can be found here.

All the best to Jamie, his crew and their upcoming projects such as the flooring of the new Whitney Museum in NYC.

– Joseph Stodgel 3/14/14