Today’s flickr fave comes from our industrious and creative pal, furniture designer Thomas Wold. Thomas collects and reassembles cabinetry and other furniture and creates spectacular assemblages. I’m especially loving the mix of colors and shapes in this one, and the fact that I can squint at the picture and get a peek at what else is going on in Thomas’s studio and try to guess what’s coming next!

O.K. now that Halloween is over, the stores are filled with Yuletide tunes, people are buzzing about Black Friday insanity, and the stores are filled with all kinds of Holiday decorations. Here are a few quick tips to decrease your holiday carbon footprint.

1) Consider sending holiday cards over the interwebs. I hate this idea because holiday cards are some of the only good snail mail I receive all year long, but it will save on paper and the energy used to deliver your cards. If you can’t stand the thought, at least use recycled paper, and be sure to recycle the cards you receive.

2) Use reusable or recycled wrapping paper. If you’re like my grandparents, you neatly folded up every piece of wrapping paper you ever used and put it in a drawer, and never used it again. You can use newspaper, recycled paper, cloth bags, or a pretty extra piece of fabric you have around the house to wrap up your gifts. Here’s a fun video with some good ideas if you want to get super-crafy:

3) If you do the tree thing, don’t feel too guilty. Christmas tree farms are not the enemy. Just be sure to leave your tree out for mulch composting after the holidays. You may also consider a live tree to plant later (though honestly, in most parts of this country, January 1st is not exactly prime dig-a-hole-in-the-ground-and-plant time).

4) E-cycle: If you’re expecting to upgrade some of your electronics via some killer gifts, make sure you dispose of your old ones in a recyclable way. If they are not fit for donation or resale, check the EPA’s guidelines for E-cycling them.

5) Buy eco-friendly gifts. I love to shop handmade, and from the green sections of retail websites. I’ll be working up a list of what Design Public has to offer in this arena in the coming weeks.  Here’s one of my many faves, the k studio Birds Pillow:

It’s getting chilly outside. Winter is the time of year where it’s too easy to waste all kinds of energy and it can cost you a lot of extra dollars. There are a few quick and easy things you can do that will save you a big bucks. Start with an online survey from The U.S. Department of Energy’s Home Energy Saver. If you have a few more bucks set aside now to save a lot later, consider having someone audit your house. The Building Performance Institute Inc. can help you find a local contractor who has been certified to audit your home here.

If you are raring to put a few items on the honey-do list this weekend here are a few quick and easy energy saving moves you can do yourself:

1) Install a programmable thermostat.

2) Wrap your water heater in an insulating blanket (this will run you about $20). Make sure your water heater is at a low setting (usually a little lever near the bottom – even I was able to find this sucker, and I’m terrible at this stuff).

3) Add weather stripping to your windows and doors where needed (you know where you’ve felt a draft coming in – every time you feel it, imaging the dollars slipping right out those cracks.

4) Have your HVAC equipment serviced. Last time I had someone out, they let me know that some shrubs around my A/C unit were making it work twice as hard and once they were gone it saved me a ton.

5) Purely a money saver: If you are not locked in at a good per-therm rate and you use natural gas, call the gas company to lock in a good rate per-therm. Call around to a few to find out their best deal – if you don’t want to switch, your current company will likely match the lowest rate you find in order to keep your business. I didn’t realize that I wasn’t locked in last year; when I finally locked in a rate, I cut my gas bill by 50%!

I was really glad we received an email from Carolina Fontoura Alzaga. She makes elegant, Victorian-style chandeliers out of recycled bike parts. I love to see projects where I have to look really hard to figure out what the parts were in their former lives.

Yes, at random, Environmental Tuesday is back. As I’ve been decluttering, I have not been able to toss out the mason jars full of wine corks I’ve collected for years. I never really intended on making a corkboard out of them (though this is a good idea and a great way to recycle them), but I could not bring myself to add them to a landfill even though I was trying to purge clutter like crazy. Perhaps I sensed that there was somewhere out there that would take them all along, because…

…There is a great new organization called ReCORK by Amorim that combines two of my favorite things, WINE AND SHOES! They want your used corks. Started California wine country in 2008, ReCORK is partnering with restaurants, wineries and airlines to collect used corks so that they can be reused in products like floor tiles, building insulation, automotive gaskets, craft materials, soil conditioner and sports equipment…and SHOES! In particular, they have partnered with a shoe manufacturer called SOLE to make shoes out of the wine corks.

A quick glance at how it works: Check the ReCORK site for drop-off areas in your city and take your corks. If you don’t have a drop off area, ReCORK will send you a shipping tag, however, in order to keep carbon footprint down and not erase all of their good efforts, they want 15 pounds of corks at a time. Atlanta, even though I first read about ReCORK in the AJC, according to the site, we don’t have any drop off centers yet! Atlanta restauranteurs and wine shop owners, how about it? You may sign up just to recycle your own corks, or to be a collection partner, so that people can drop off their corks with you.

By the way, if you have any green resources or ideas you’d like us to spread the word about, please let me know in the comments section. I’d love to revive this series.

all images via ReCORK.org