Grinded crafts & the W’s¶
(Good name for a band, no?)
Now in all seriousness (maybe), I present you: Grinded crafts!
Who started what when: pink-to-matic needs ink (and I need coffee)¶
Two worlds colliding, two loves coming together: music and coffee. What does one need more? (I know: food, love, Mysa, … I know… but hypothetically!)
During Fab Academy I made an open source portable desktop press printing machine. My goal is -of course- to print at home but also to use it on merch boots at festivals, concerts or in your living room when you organise a living room concert. The goal is to reduce the amount of waste merch that bands often have, allowing them to have more personalised merch for fans (who wouldn’t want to print their own shirt?!) and create different designs quickly (with a date of the show, or a local artist design, …).
Having the machine ready, there still were (and still are) a few add-ons I really want to make. First of all: the stamps. I want to create a bio based stamping material that is similar to lino so that you can use it both in the machine and to print manually. But without a proper ink, printing doesn’t exist. So there’s the second goal: a good (fabric) printing ink!
Why: coffee as a binder¶
“Should I kill myself, or have a cup of coffee?” ― Albert Camus
If you ask me, I would always choose coffee.
I believe a world without coffee would be missing out on some of the basic human needs: drinking and gathering. It’s not that every time I have a coffee I need to have it with other people, it’s that it’s a culture, a way of gathering like-minded people in the same spot. There are only a few things in the world that have this gathering power (that don’t scare me) and that would be music and drinks.
Therefor it was crucial to keep this project at a small scale for now. Local, zero waste and circular. Of course with big dreams to expand and grow in the future. (Dream big, always!)
Keeping it close to home (or in my case, my second home in Middelburg) I asked Esther from Het Koffiepand whether she would be interested in combining forces. I would keep on drinking coffee in her bar and I would collect some of her waste to make and experiment with. Right from the very start Esther was hooked on the idea as she runs her bar from a local and an as little waste as possible perspective, recycling her coffee waste is a good thing. (Oh and for the future: she also has lots of avocado peels and pits. I know what to ask next ;-))
If she would’ve said no, Mysa would’ve most definitely won her over with her saddest puppy eyes. How could’ve she said no to these!?
Where it all started: used ground coffee¶
“I like coffee exceedingly...” ― H.P. Lovecraft
Me too. And my coffee bars too. They know me, I know them. We talk. So gathering coffee waste was the easy part.
Coffee as a resource is a fairly easy thing to come by. If you make coffee at home, you probably already have enough to get started in a day or two. When you thing about coffee shops, restaurants and pubs nearby: they always have plenty of waste.
The leftover cookies that form in the passa portafilter after making an espresso have the perfect grind for all the coffeexploration needed to be done for Grinded Crafts. Let’s craft away!
Who, what, where, why and when it all started with coffee (and sort of ends and re-starts too)¶
Grinded crafts is a story of people working together. People doing their own thing and by doing so helping others to do the same. In return they offer something back. It’s called a circular economy and I believe it’s the way to go. Nothing comes for free and everything we waste, is gone for good. We cannot build an earth 2.0 and a lot of people don’t seem to be fully aware we are using more of our natural resources than we can ever return. Working locally, circular and with zero waste therefor is the only way to go.
So as a thank you stamps and kombucha were made for Esther and Het Koffiepand. She’s using them to stamp all of her take-away boxes. Pretty cool, no?
