$10K On The Internet and $5 On The Wall | Thank You!

 

We did it! With the deadline for our IndieGoGo campaign on the horizon, our friends and family and community supporters, YOU collectively pushed us across the finish line. Yesterday, Facebook and Twitter erupted with support for the project and support rolled in; over $1500 of it in the last two days of our campaign! For this we can only say:

THANK YOU!

This community support will bring us one big step closer to matching granted funds and getting this garden a rollin'! We do still have more work to do, and you can still contribute—and get great perks like art and coffee and organic produce—until midnight tonight! We're still working away on grants and other fundraising initiatives and we can use all the support we can get.

Mike Layton, AFC's Natalie Boustead, CSI's Tonya Surman and Lauren Pirie (excited!) in front of the Everything Roof's wall of 5s!

And so much support we did get from our amazing community right at the home of the Everything Roof: the Centre for Social Innovation, Annex on Tuesday. Even before the Great Lakes Brewery beers were cracked, you could feel the love for the project in the Annex Lounge... and see it on the wall! Throughout the day, CSI and other community members flowed through—including ever-supportive Councillor Mike Layton—and taped five dollar bills on a projection of the Everything Roof drawing on the wall. By the end of the day, the contributions totaled $700!

And today, we got some extra love on the internet from our friends at Pure Green Magazine. Their new issue is focused on the urban farm, and to coincide, an interview with About Face on the Everything Roof is featured on their blog. Check it out here. And keep watching this space, our Facebook and Twitter for volunteer opportunities, upcoming events, news and more!

Thank you, thank you, thank you!

All the best EVERYTHING,
The About Face Collective

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.

Pure Green Zine, Money!

How the h it's taken this long for us to discover Pure Green Mag, we do not know. But now we know! Yeah yeah, you're like "Pff, Pure Green's only been like the coolest sustainable ish for the last year, don't you read the internet?"

Sapna's DIY fun!

So we read the internet today, and it told us that our good friend Sapna had contributed one of her many talents (not that one) to the DIY instructional of this mystery magazine. Intrigue! After some link-clicking and about an hour of the afternoon spent staring at its pretty pages via the computer screen, we'd discovered that PG is a refreshingly stylish Canadian green living and design mag. This issue has a cover featuring a babe with a bike (10 points), articles on Montreal vintage hunting, book binding, organic recipes (um, blue cheese beet cakes with hot pepper cream whuut! 100 points) fruit and veggies preserving and for that extra win with my heart strings, an interview and lovely photo spread of the Algonquin Park Lodge owned by my childhood camp owners (a lot of points).

We also really like their mandate to "have, a strong undercurrent of handmade culture; it supports small businesses and features green designers from around the world. We are very passionate in our views on green living, and don't for one second think that living green means sacrificing style." I don't know how many points that all adds up to, but probably at least a million. We're excited to kick back with a print version coming soon. For now, if you have some time to kill, do it here.