This is a Japanese tradition we desperately need to adopt in North America – re-using textiles to wrap presents. It’s an art form, but it’s worth learning because it dispenses with all the annoying and wasteful tape and paper and ribbon, it’s a fun skill to learn (for kids too), and it’s an educational conversation piece – you might have to explain to the recipient what it is, but that’s probably worthwhile. Christmas is a forest disaster when you combine its Christmas trees and its paper usage. Any textile will work – just use some old fabric, recycle some scarves, or buy scarves/shawls from thrift and then watch some furoshiki tying videos. Any size of cloth will do – for the larger bags/wrapping you should look for the 40″ size of scarf shawl. In Japan, furoshiki were traditionally used as practical carrying bags as well as ceremonial wrapping. For the more utilitarian uses, people would carry a furoshiki cloth around with them, just in case, and tie it into a tote bag as the need arose. This habit will become very useful here once plastic bags are banned, and that’s soon (see the videos below to see how to tie a quick tote bag). Last year’s post on this topic is here and instructional furoshiki videos are here and here. Video directly below is great – Mick Jagger bought a furoshiki at this shop – but I hate the part where they walk away from the furoshiki shop with their purchases in glossy cardboard envelopes and paper bags! Photos here are all Creative Commons licensed on Flickr, by kirainet and vaneea.

And advanced:

This thing, known as McBarge by Vancouverites, is the hulking remains of a floating McDonalds. It was custom-built for our Expo ‘86 World’s Fair and then carelessly left rusting in the harbour for 23 years as some sort of ghost ship. I hadn’t thought about it until this week when I saw a funny conceptual artwork by Kate Sansom in the current exhibition Science Fiction_01  at Vancouver’s Or Gallery, where the artist has set up an office inside the gallery as a research base for tracking down McBarge’s mysterious current owners and discovering what they ever intend to do with it. This is also how I found a funny web photo essay, at the aptly named wraiths.ca, describing a recent unauthorized reconnaissance  - okay, a break-in – of McBarge’s rundown interior. I remembered this barge as an eyesore, but the thing is, with the golden arches gone and all its red-and-yellow, ketchup-and-mustard colour scheme removed, its design elements aren’t bad. If someone offered it to me, I’d take it. Think what you could do with it! But I have a hankering to see the owner of this thing eternally bound to atone for its careless waste by wandering around telling his/her cautionary tale to unwilling strangers, like the Ancient Mariner. Couldn’t someone have at least donated the use of this thing for some useful purpose? Photos of McBarge above are by Ashley Fisher (unk’s dump truck), Matt Hoekstra (the blurb) and Roger (Rog45) by permission. I took the last photo on Sunday, June 28, 2009.