HOT TIP: when boycotting, try dupe recipes at home to share with friends. Sometimes there isn't a local alternative brand available but there is always someone with a recipe blog on the internet. I can still have doublestuffed mint chocolate sandwich cookies without funding the capitalist machine crushing my American friends ☺️

This recipe I used 1 cup butter substitute (i used a canola spread) 1 ¼ cups all-purpose flour ½ cup cocoa powder (i use trade aid or donovans) ½ cup golden syrup 1 teaspoon baking powder ¼ teaspoon salt 1 cup granulated sugar 1 teaspoon vanilla extract

Mix in a food processor then set in the fridge for 25 minutes

Filling: ½ cup vegetable shortening 1 teaspoon vanilla extract 1 cup powdered sugar 1/4 cup flour Mint extract to taste

Or just do a small spoonful of peanutbutter as a filling

Roll out the dough to about 5mm thickness. Stamp and cut.

My oven is a joke so not sure the temp but i turn it on and bake for about 8-10 minutes. It will be a low temperature, probably like 170c. They are still soft when i pull them out so I let them sit on the pan to cool before filling and stacking

Mōrena buzzy bees!

I've been off hunting beach treasures on some more remote beaches in the area. The amount of fishing and building waste is unreal! , buoys, treated timber posts and framing. A lot of plastic crab pot pieces and rope ends. We even found a piece of a pontoon which I'll be making into a new garden bed! We also saw a dead albatross, which was fascinating, but with the birdflu, we decided it was best to keep our distance.

Fellow dumpster divers and rubbish gremlins, what has been your favourite find?

Kia ora and happy new year 🎉

What are our hopes and dreams for 2025, and how are we going to work towards making them happen?

Kia ora koutou katoa 💚

Some of you may remember me. I took a hiatus due to poor health and technical difficulties, but I'm back and ready to talk about all things community! I still need to catch up on reading everything posted for the last year, so please forgive me (and perhaps link me!) if any of this has already been covered 😅

Over the last year and a bit, I've been an elected member of my local community council, office holder of our Toy library, started working in emergency response communications, and helped start a community workshop. It's been a process learning how to navigate egos and still make progress.

I've found I absolutely love consensus decision-making and co-chair structures! Here in Aotearoa, there has been a change to the incorporated societies act. we are all required to rewrite our constitutions, which means we can hardwire more community-minded processes into our organisations. This will be especially handy for limiting the amount of control hostile council members can wield and hopefully lead to a more positive and productive future.

I literally just got a working phone yesterday, but I'm hoping to put together some resource lists for grants and community group structures. I think it would also be great to discuss what an ideal community looks like and what sort of community infrastructure can we implement on an individual level to move us closer to that vision. Think community gardens, free pantries, repair cafes, alternative recycling, co-working space, time banks, community workshops and tool libraries etc etc etc. We could come up with how-to guides to help other get similar things going in their communities making the process more accessible!

I also want to discuss software for community. We are switching our Toy library system in the next year, but the options for small non-profit community groups are limited. I think we've found one to handle general catalog with reserves and loans, but there doesn't seem to be anything out there at the moment to handle our future plans of starting a time bank.

Please TLDR about your lives over the last year. I want to hear about all you amazing people 🥰

Is it a favourite park or walking track? The library? Do you have a really fun festival that your community is known for? Tells us about it!

The top is linen and made with the (free) peppermint wraptop pattern and the shorts are made from a damaged quilt I found at a charity shop. I was also able to make a bag, pair of dungarees, and a hat from this quilt! I did add pockets to the shorts but these patterns didn't really need any altering. The bag is self drafted, just a slouchy backpack with a fron pocket and drink bottle holders.

Every city should have a toy library. With limited space and limited income our toy library has been essential to my daughters playtime happiness. It's sustainable, teaches responsible toy care, allows her to try out new things and access the flash toys we wouldn't be able to otherwise. It also creates a sense of community from a young age. She sees her friends playing with the same truck she borrowed the week before and gets excited about taking home the castle toy she's seen. The anticipation of waiting for the next toy she's been eyeing brings Christmas-morning like joy all year round without adding to over consumption of new products that end up neglected.

Our toy library has things like dressups, large outdoor toys, play sets, baby activity centres, boardgames, and pretty much everything in between. It's been an equaliser for lower income families as their kids can have access to those motorised cars, the fancy pickler triangle/climbing sets, and name brand toys without actually having to buy them.

a quick intro on how to get started

It's such a neat concept that can make certain expensive services like lawyers or therapists more accessible. I could trade a few hours gardening, sewing, cleaning, or baking, for someone else to give me a hand building a larger project. It's a beautiful way to connect a community through acts of service 🥰

So happy so many of you are also interested in finding, sharing, and discussing new ways to better our communities! I hope everyone finds inspiration here and we all get to brighten up our little corners of the world.

I would love to hear from people about what is working in your community.

What does your community have or do that you think is going well? (Maybe its a neat festival. Maybe it's a community centre like a workshop or garden. Share the ideas!)

What small things have you done that you would like to do more of? (Cleaned up rubbish on the beach? Planted some trees? Helped with a fundraiser or event? Good on you, we're all proud! Tell us so we can all get motivated to go out and do the same)

What are you wanting for your community? (Maybe its helping with food insecurity, maybe its cleaning up parks or planting trees, maybe it's better public transport)

No task is too big or too small to share, this is a place of positivity and celebration ✨️

Here's an article with links to resources on starting your own library of things. It's US centric but still has good ideas I've been stealing for getting ours organised

It took me ages and I hated the process but I absolutely love it. It's very dense. The base fabric was a peice of curtain. The yarns are a mix of what ever I could find. I bought some new and found some 2nd hand or was given them. It took a looooooot of yarn.

I want to make more but I'll have to invest in a rug gun first 🙃

This is probably my favourite outfit at the moment. I do have a lady bug caplet in the works but I haven't come across the perfect lining yet.

Self drafted the dungarees based on a vintage Busybodies pattern I found at the dump for some shorts. Added pockets, a bib, ruffles, straps, adjusted sizing, changed the waistband and essentially just looked at the front of the envelope for inspiration on the shorts shape.

For the blouse, I altered the milkmaid dress pattern from Lydia Naomi, adjusting fit and changing it from a side zipper to a back corset closure with inbuilt back pannel.

All the fabrics and notions are 2nd hand. The lace, strawberry fabric, blouse lining, dungaree lining and gingham fabric are from the dump. The eyelets for the corset and ribbon are from a garage sale and the ladybug denim was gifted to me by my best friend who found it at a charity shop.

She is both the cuddliest kitty and the sharpest kitty I have ever met

I've been wanting to get a proper microscope so I can do my own spore examinations to identify local fungi but it's been out of budget. This looks like a much more affordable option so now off to find some plexiglass and laser pointers at the dump.

My partner and I made this wee tunnel house out of dumped hothouse plastic, old vineyard netting, polypipe we found in the forest, and old fence posts. We had to buy some timber for the framing and zip ties to hold the materials together but we got to make use of so many dumped materials.

It's built to hold all my seedtrays, cuttings, seedlings, and saplings for my garden. I still need to build some shelves inside to help organise the space, tidy up thr edges, and add a door but I'm happy with it for now.

Ignore the pile of logs, they are going in the alleyway to the left and behind the tunnel house as mushroom logs.

Sorry I don't want to come off as spammy but I also want us to have lots of fun content so more people feel encouraged to share 🥰 I could look at garden and crafty posts all day.

I wanted to give this coat a slouchy old plushtoy feel so i undersised the lining and edged it in a blanket stitch. I'm really happy with it and I wear it all the time

****noooo the cursed horizontal formatting is back! The pictures are vertical in my phone. I resaved them and double checked

**** okay i resaved them all with a 3rd party app. This is the way. Someone pleSe fix how jerboa reads photo orientation.

I've been saving the scraps from everything I make and have finally gotten around to sorting and quilting them up. I think I'm going to make a dress but I might have to make bellbottoms and a bomber jacket. I'm undecided. I have some time to think on it as I have a heap of scraps to sew

Like any good garden it's all still a work in progress but I've had the central herb bed a few years now and I've been working on establishing some wind breaks and hedges before planting out the rest of the beds with more sensitive herbs and dye plants.

**idk why the pictures aren't showing up? I lowered the res and they show up as loaded on preview?

Not sure why the image is displaying sideways in preview? This is my first post so still figuring it all out. *I've tried adding it to the body of this post to see if that works better. Just testing things. Please ignore **okay so for anyone else encountering that issue, it reads photos taken as vertical photos as horizontal unless that photo is resaved as a whole new image.

I've been trying to maximise what I grow in my garden so I've inoculated ny berry patch beds with winecap mushrooms. They seem to like similar acidity levels and do well together so I put a mix of straw and wood chip mulch down with some spawn the start of last spring. My berries did great, the soil has never looked better, and I got a tasty bonus crop.

I've got a big pile of logs to inoculate with a couple other varties this winter and more garden beds to build in the veggie patch. I love looking at what everyone else is growing in their gardens so I'm looking forward to seeing this wee community grow 🌱