Western industrial design students introduced their “upcycled” yard and garden products at the opening reception of the annual ReMade exhibition at Ideal on Friday, Nov. 6.
As a part of class project called ReMade, students proposed their own ideas of reusing post-consumer waste and turned them into products related to the main theme of this year’s project, yard and garden.
After the designing products and producing a limited edition of 20 each, they actually started selling their handmade products through Ideal, a store in the downtown Bellingham, from Nov. 6 through Nov. 21, or until all the products sold out, according to Ideal’s website.
The store was full of people on the opening reception day, who then got the opportunity to talk with the creators of products.
Dolores Kuiper, one of visitors from the Bellingham community, was impressed with the project as a whole and the unique products students created.
“All of the products are actually usable and interesting,” Kuiper said.
The store, Ideal, opens Monday through Saturday from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. and Sunday from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m.
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Western junior Justin Janczakowski reused discarded red safety cones and turned them into visible and extremely durable, waterproof planters. He cut each cone into three pieces and poured molded resin into it as a base, he said.) His goal originally wasn’t to make a planter, but he eventually found a way to reuse a cone as a planter, he said. -
Edward Hanko, a western junior student in industrial design major, introduced his product, Felt, made of used tennis balls. Felt is intended to be a work mat or a gardening mat that people can use for a wide variety of purposes at home, Hanko said. “It was actually a lot harder to find that many tennis balls than I thought,” he said. “(Another challenging part was) drilling them all, and there are hour holes on each one.” He said he ended up drilling 1,600 holes in total. -
Western junior Tacha Pradappet created containers, named Pulpa, made out of molded pulp of garden and yard wastes, which includes vegetables pulp, sawdust, newspaper and abaca. To form stable container shape, she needed to bake them for five days and sand each of them, Pradappet said. “(In the oven,) it has to be the right temperature to take it out of mold, or (a container) breaks,” she said. “There are so many in my oven, and my house is really hot.” -
Western junior Trevan Strean came up with an idea while he was playing with a climbing rope. His product, Urchin, is a toy ball made from a tennis ball with short pieces of climbing rope glued to it. The most challenging part in the whole process was to cut ropes in consistent length because each ball needs more than one hundred of those pieces, Strean said. “It requires something like 4,000 cuts or more of ropes [in total],” he said. -
Meghan Saunders, a Western junior in industrial major, created a house for mason bees, named Thrive, made out of old wooden materials she found at an old barn. She drilled many small holes into it and cut it into hexagonal pieces, since mason bees prefer that size of diameter and those holes attract them to lay their future generation into it, she said. “Next season, you have all these new generation of mason bees to help pollinating your garden,” she said. Her experience as sustainable design minor helped her to come up with the idea, she said “Having your own garden is such an awesome way to eliminate wasting energy that’s not necessary,” Saunders said. “You can just eat vegetables from your garden without any transportation.”
