Beautiful custom made furniture

I just bought a flat. Well, I did in November, and it’s still sinking in.

Luckily for me I could more or less move in, although there was a fair amount of stuff to be done, and I am lucky enough to know the kind of people who can do that stuff (painting, stripping beams etc – contact me for references!)

Anyway, I have various bits of furniture that I need and I really didn’t want to go down the made-in-china-ikea route and I am fortunate enough to have artesan friends who not only have the skills but also a good line in well-sourced wood.

The following is a link so some amazing custom made benches made for my kitchen. I have asked the same fantastic carpenter to make me some other custom woodwork which will appear here soon… 

I can’t recommend enough in terms of quality and understanding of the customer’s needs – check him out:

http://carpinteriahamzaoui.weebly.com/muebles-a-medida.html

Dirty White Gold

I’ve posted before about the true costs of ‘cheap’ clothing, most recently in the ‘Who Made My Pants’ article. Well here is someone doing some great work into investigating those costs in more detail.

From her website:

“Leah Borromeo is making a film about fashion and its real victims. She is on a mission – she wants to make ethics and sustainability in the fashion industry the norm, not the exception, by making the supply chain transparent.  And she is on a journey to find out how to make this a reality.”

Leah is crowdsourcing funds to complete a documentary about the real costs of cheap cotton, starting with why up to 300,000 Indian farmers – at one point, up to 26 per day -have killed themselves to escape debt.

See a trailer for the documentary “Dirty White Gold” by clicking the link.

Check out the trailer and the site, and if you are moved/concerned, you can sponsor the film here. Your few euros could make a real difference.

Papers Coma – get your printing and binding done here.

I just want to briefly raise the profile of Papers Coma again – they really are a fantastic place to do business. I just had to get some reasonably complex printing and binding done. It was done promptly and efficiently with a smile – when I was in a rush they said they’d hang on to it until the morning when I could come in and pay. Because I was doing quite a high volume they even reduced the price by 1 cent per page.

About 10000000 times better than when I tried to get the same thing done at the dreary, impersonal and expensive Workcenter. Seriously, if you need anything from professional binding to photocopying, this is the place to come.