Claire Hall Painting Up For Grabs for One Lucky Donor

Poppies by Claire Hall, 36 x 48" Oil on Canvas

You've been meaning to donate to our online fundraising campaign, haven't you? You're so excited to see the Everything Roof come to fruition and you want to help make sure this unique roof top project has a chance to help make Toronto the more sustainable city we know it can be. You've just been trying to decide whether to choose the donor perk of a Fresh City produce box delivered to your door or a collection of cute, illustrated cards... maybe even dedicate a garden container to your Mom (mother's day does come quickly). And while you sit and stare blankly at your blank wall trying to decide, you think, I need some art.      

(Insert sparkle explosion here).      

(Also, it’s a bit creepy that we can read your mind, right?).      

We're so excited to offer this one shot chance for you to make a difference by doing something we know you already want to: purchasing a lovely piece of artwork by Toronto-based artist, Claire Hall.

Claire has been a long time supporter of this project and has generously donated Poppies, the 36 x 48” oil painting pictured above. The gallery price for this piece is $600, but for a $450 donation, to the Everything Roof it’s yours! This is a one-time special offer, so click through now to grab this piece while it’s available, it’s sure to go quickly.      

You can also click through here to see more of Claire’s work and learn more about her unique approach to painting, custom options, and her great story.      

With only three weeks left in our IndieGoGo campaign, we've got some work to do to meet our fundraising goal of $10,000. By hitting this goal, we’ll be one step closer to matching the funds granted to us by Live Green Toronto and getting the Everything Roof, um, off the ground. Help us make this happen by donating any amount today. And maybe even get yourself a great piece of art while you’re at it!

Everything Roof on Frame Magazine

We've been so happy to have a bunch of great local media support lately, but how 'bout this? The Everything Roof featured on Frame Magazine; a shout-out all the way from Amsterdam! Check it out for a great slideshow with some behind-the-scenes shots from our Everything Roof video shoot!

International Women's Weekend and Beyond

Happy (belated) International Women's Day! We posted this on our Twitter and Facebook page yesterday, but thought it was pretty important and wanted to get it up here as well. We also hope that no one will mind us extending such an important occasion just a day; we hope you'll continue to celebrate all year. 

We're so thankful to have great female leaders and role models in our lives, including our incredible mentors at Centre for Social Innovation. We wish this situation were far more common; representation of women in leadership positions is still so minimal and the media's misrepresentation of women continues to hinder great potential to change this. It can change, and you can help. Start by watching this video from Miss Representation. Then encourage the women in your life to go for it! The world needs them!

Happy Friday! Bring on ladies' night.

The Everything Roof On The Interweb, and Other New Things

The Everything Roof on Treehugger! Eee!

We are now nearing the half-way mark of our IndieGoGo campaign. While we've made a lot of exciting progress over the past few weeks, we're still at about a third of our goal, so we've got a lot of work to do! We're so thankful for the contributions that have come in so far and for all of your help in getting the word out there about the Everything Roof and encouraging others to contribute what they can.

The past month has been a whirlwind of meetings and interviews and grant-writing and planning. We've updated the roof layout, which you can check out in the revised illustration on the campaign page. We've plotted in the planned roof-top room, topped with bi-facial solar panels and enclosed by walls of reclaimed vintage windows. And since the panels are now on top of this "Social Solarium" as we've dubbed it, that means we've been able to move the garden and stage area up to the front of the building for an even more amazing view of the city! Wooh! We've also worked in an exciting new rain-water catchment system, planned to be a collaboration with soon-to-be-announced installation artists. Stay tuned!

By staying tuned, we also hope you'll be hearing some more positive news about results of grants we've been applying for (fingers crossed, lucky underpants on), but you'll definitely be hearing news of some interviews and features in upcoming issues of a few exciting publications. We'll let you know when those drop, but we've already had a lot of love from the interweb and some of our favorite blogs. Check out a few below and keep spreading the good word!

Love,

The AFC

Treehugger.com: Turning a Toronto Roof into an Urban Garden and Community Space—Feb 20, 2012

Toronto Standard: The Everything Roof—Feb 17, 2012

Indie T.O: The About Face Collective and The Everything Roof—Feb 6, 2012

The NEW Everything Roof Layout!

The (Pure Green) Joy of Books

Pure Green Magazine IN PRINT (and on cafe table) Volume One

Happy Monday, Internet! We hope you had a lovely weekend—perhaps wandering around outside in this unseasonably pleasant Toronto weather; perhaps sprawled on the couch, dipping nachos in beer and watching Madonna win the World Series (that is what happened, right?). I personally happened to forgo the latter of those options this year (only the sports watching, I still dipped my nachos in beer, of course). I did manage to get out wandering on Saturday, though. My adventures included a visit to a favorite weekend nerd-out destination, Type Books.

At Type I finally picked up a copy of the first PRINT edition of Pure Green Magazine. (Insert authentic nerd squeal here). You may recall us posting about the lovely, sustainably focused magazine, its DIY projects, vintage home decor, green style and ah-may-zing (looking) organic recipes some time ago (I WILL make those honey butter tuiles with caramelized figs and roasted pistachio marscapone soon). You may also recall us promising to keep you posted about the launch of their print version. So, we're a bit behind, but here we are!

The print version of the magazine is a gorgeous, 95 page book, printed locally on 100% post-consumer recycled, chlorine-free paper using vegetable inks. You can read the magazine online here, but it simply doesn't compare to sitting in a sunny cafe, flipping through the lovely matte pages of a real-life, quality printed version. This is how I spent my Super Bowl Sunday. And it brings to mind the debate of print versus digital reading, which you can read more about here. A quick summary: if you read online for more than 30 minutes, studies say you may as well be reading in print if eco-impact is your concern.

I am, admittedly, a sucker for printed material (as you may have gathered above). Luckily, there are constantly new efforts being made in publishing and printing to lessen the environmental impact of printed things. Margaret Atwood's release of her most recent book printed on straw paper in partnership with Canopy was a notable one. On top of also being more appealing to kick back with, subscribing to print versions of magazines like Pure Green or picking up a good old book from your local book store helps support indie publications (and publishing in general) as well as indie book stores. For a nerd like me, that's a good thing.

Subscribe to Pure Green here, or if you're in Toronto, head down to Type.  And if you haven't seen this stop-motion gem that's been floating around the internet, click play below. Made at Type by Sean Ohlenkamp, The Joy of Books peeks into the after-dark adventures of the books in the store. Created by a series of undoubtedly insanely laborious stop-motion shoots (we know, because our shoot for ten seconds of stop-motion was insanely laborious) the short ends on a note that "There's Nothing Quite Like a Real Book". True that.

You can also listen to Type store owner discussing the importance of independent book stores with Jian Gomeshi on CBC's Q recently here.

So many things! Good thing there's no baseball to watch tonight.

Everything Roof Video and Campaign Launch

So, apparently it's Wednesday. Yesterday—that would make yesterday Tuesday, yes?—I ran around the Centre For Social Innovation hunting for speaker cables and coordinating the signing of signatures and re-re-revising grants...

I ran into one of the lovely animators (almost literally) who asked me how everything was going. She smiled and watched me sweat for a minute while I pushed the corners of my mouth up in attempts to form some similar sort of face and mused: it was going great, but dang, it had been a crazy week!

"It's Tuesday," she said.

So it was. And it was a SERIOUS Tuesday. I don't know what that means, but it was quite a day. CAPS, italics, you get it. We arrived at CSI before nine a.m. (I rarely have pants on at this hour) to prepare for the lunchtime launch of our long-awaited Everything Roof video (!!!), directed by our hero, Josh Raskin and made in part by our heroes, everyone we know.

To coincide, in the afternoon, we also launched our online video and fundraising campaign on Indiegogo and Vimeo. We also managed to get our grant application hand-delivered to the Evergreen offices—and even wandered around the Brickworks in sunny relief afterward; see photos below. In between all of this I attended a couple of meetings and inhaled an amazing vegan, gluten-free pizza from the CSI farmers' market (seriously amazing. Go to there).

Anyway, I know you're dyyying to hear what I did with the rest of my day (I hit refresh on webpages to watch numbers go up) but without any further adieu (or brackets or run-on sentences) HERE is the video! Almost 1000 people have seen it in its first day up. If each of those people were to donate just $10, we would already be able to reach our campaign goal!

Please visit our Indiegogo campaign page by clicking here and donate if you can. Any amount helps!

Help us spread the word! Blog, Tweet, Facebook, ICQ, whatev!

We like you.

Love, The About Facers

We hope that Evergreen loves us as much as we love them. If you have yet to visit Evergreen Brickworks, go now. It's an amazing wonderland of all good things for Earth and people. A few enticing photos below.

Electric car charging outside Evergreen Brickworks

The kilns. There's art in them!

We couldn't have said it better

here

Last Chance to Submit to Bike Photo Exhibit

illustration by Lauren Pirie

The Toronto Cyclists Union is hosting a photography exhibit at the Centre For Social Innovation, Annex on Thursday, February 2nd. The open call for submissions closes tomorrow, so time to hustle! We know all you photog friends of ours have some lovely shots of so-and-so pedaling through the park last Summer (remember Summer??). So do a little digging and drop them off tomorrow at the front desk at CSI. Or dig a little less and pull out a Fall or Winter biking shot; the theme of the show is The Four Seasons of Cycling, which means you could also submit a cycling-focused shot taken in the Spring. And remind us all that it will eventually come around again...

365 Days of Cycling: An Evening of Art and Cycling.

Submission details here.

Facebook event here.

Jan 25: UPDATE!
Digital submissions will be accepted through Friday. ALSO, 100% of the selling price of any work sold goes directly to the artist. Wooh! Check the detes here.