Plenty Epicurean Pantry

photo courtesy of Jenn Playford (www.furochic.com)

Thank-you to everyone who came out to enjoy Buy Nothing Day at Plenty!  The store was filled with folding and wrapping as well as tea, coffee, hot apple cider, and samples of chocolate.  There was wonderful conversation, creativity and laughter throughout the day.

A colourful crane created with paper collected by Gillian Gravenor

We made a good start on creating 1000 Cranes for Action on Climate Change.  The store filled with people creating cranes.  Thank-you to everyone who stopped in, Tatiana for sharing her photo, and to Gillian for sharing her fantastic collection of papers and leading us in crane making!  Veronique, from Not Just Pretty (next door) also created cranes and brought them by at the end of the day.  We’ll continue to make and put cranes up until December 18th when the Copenhagen climate summit concludes.   If you’ve contributed cranes that you’d like to collect back please pick them up on December 18th.  After that date we will be selling the cranes (many are very remarkable - made from a collection of maps and posters that artist Gillian Gravenor has contributed).  The cranes will be sold for $2 each with all proceeds going to the Mustard Seed Food Bank.

Crane making photo courtesy of Tatiana & Paul

Following the origami workshop Jenn Playford gave a Furochic workshop.  Participants sampled Golden Star sparkling tea and Sandy Ferris‘ amazing sugar plums (you can try her famous brownies and tea at the store as well).  Please read more about the workshop on Jenn’s blog and on the blog of a participant: One Nice Thing.  Here are a few quotes from it:

On Friday, I attended a celebration of Buy Nothing Day at Plenty Epicurean Pantry, a shop located on Fort Street in Victoria, BC. For them, it was a day to think about how to make consumer choices more sustainable, as well as to celebrate consumer choices that can help build and strengthen our communities.

As part of the celebration, the store closed their till for the day and hosted a number of workshops led by local artists and entrepreneurs. The workshop that I attended was on the art of furoshiki, the Japanese tradition of wrapping gifts and everyday items in cloth. It was led by Jenn Playford, the author of Wrapagami and local owner of Furochic.

Well, oh my goodness! I had no idea how fun, easy and pretty wrapping gifts with cloth could be. Now I’m waiting anxiously for someone to invite me over for dinner so that I can bring them a bottle of wine wrapped in some gorgeous flowery fuchsia cloth!

This workshop has inspired me to try wrapping all of my gifts with cloth this holiday season, not only because it will be eco-friendly, not only because I think it might be simpler and more fun, but also because it will allow me to feel a little bit crafty.

Photo Courtesy of Jenn Playford (www.furochic.com)

Following the Furochic workshop Stuart Munro (he is also a wonderful photographer) and Don Nathan played jazz guitar during our Happy Hour Open House.

Thank-you again to everyone who participated in Plenty’s first annual Buy-Nothing-Day!