A guide to creating community-based art installations using green waste, invasive species and natural materials Disposing of unwanted natural materials can be expensive and time-consuming, or it can present a tremendous opportunity for creating collaborative eco-art. Invasive-species control, green-waste management, urban gardening, and traditional crafts can all be brought together to strengthen community relationships and foster responsible land stewardship. Simple, easily taught, creative techniques applied with shared purpose become the modern-day equivalent of a barn raising or a quilting bee. Common Threads is a unique guide to engaging community members in communal handwork for the greater good. Sharon Kallis provides a wealth of ideas for: Working with unwanted natural materials, with an emphasis on green waste and invasive species Visualizing projects that celebrate the human element while crafting works of art or environmental remediation Creating opportunities for individuals to connect with nature in a unique, meditative, yet community-oriented way Combining detailed, step-by-step instructions with tips for successful process and an overview of completed projects, Common Threads is a different kind of weaving book. This inspirational guide is designed to help artists and activists foster community, build empowerment, and develop a do-it-together attitude while planning and implementing works of collaborative eco-art. Sharon Kallis is a Vancouver artist who specializes in working with unwanted natural materials. Involving community in connecting traditional hand techniques with invasive species and garden waste, she creates site-specific installations that become ecological interventions. Her recent projects include The Urban Weaver Project, Aberthau: flax=food+fibre, and working closely with fiber artists, park ecologists, First Nations basket weavers, and others.

Common Threads: A Cultural History of Clothing in American Catholicism

Common Thread – Uncommon Women begins in 1863 at the foothills of the Ozark Mountains in Arkansas. This historic saga covers four generations of women, beginning with the author’s great grandmother, Minerva, who was Cherokee Native American. Minerva warned her daughter, “Jennie, they put my people on a reservation, took away their pride, and left them with no way to defend themselves. Don’t you ever let anyone hurt you or your children.” Jennie, Minerva’s daughter, was a determined woman. Her friendship with a slave created tension within her husband’s family. Thedis moral presence was a blessing to the sick, and when death won, she readied them for burial. She was destined to suffer heartbreaks too horrific to imagine. Robbie was Thedis’s second-born child. Daily she was reminded of a tragic event, the shotgun blast, her screams, and the smell of fresh blood. Born with a proud Native American heritage, these women endured hardships beyond modern comprehension, but still found joy and happiness. Marylin Hayes Martin breathed essence into her characters, taking them through some of the most difficult times in American History: the Civil War, the Great Depression, and two World Wars. Common Thread - Uncommon Women is Martin’s debut novel. “Marylin Martin’s startling book, “Common Thread - Uncommon Women,” captures the enormous well of strength, both physical and emotional, that the women who helped settle America – and who were born here, of Native American blood – had to draw on simply to survive. Alexander Stuart, author of The War Zone In “Common Thread - Uncommon Women” a story that covers the lives of four generations of her own family, Marylin Martin takes a historical family saga and raises it to a moving memorable work of art. Bill Manville, columnist for the New York Daily News

It is the early 1850s when thirteen-year-old Ashani tribe member Berko Yaba is snatched from his home in Ghana, West Africa, and placed on a slave ship bound for Jamaica. A short time later, Berko takes a new name, Jed, and reluctantly begins a new, imprisoned life with his shrewd owner. Meanwhile, in Cupar, Scotland, Johnny McDonald is like most teenage boys in his farming community, focused on raising healthy crops and animals. But when Johnny marries Diana and begins farming his own land, things begin to go wrong. Halfway across the world from each other, Jed and John endure very different challenges. As Jed battles the torture of slavery and falls in love with Mary, another slave, John fights the daily obstacles that accompany a life of farming. But when John encounters a disaster that ruins his crops and Jed discovers the Underground Railroad, fate eventually leads both men and their families to journey to a small community in southern Ontario, where common threads tie them together as they become owners of one of the largest potato farms in Canada. In this historical tale, the years pass and the families grow to include multi-racial twins, as events eventually lead a new generation to Mississippi, where everyone must face the sorrows of prejudice.

Common Threads of Teenage Grief is so popular because it's teens talking to teens about how they dealt with and healed from grief. Copies have been sold in quantity to MADD for its libraries, to funeral homes as give-aways, and a benefactor who sent them to New York after 9/11. This book is used by school and clergy counselors in working with teens.

“Courageous, achingly honest." —Michelle Alexander, New York Times bestselling author of The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness “A compelling, incisive and thoughtful examination of race, origin and what it means to be called an American. Engaging, heartfelt and beautifully written, Lythcott-Haims explores the American spectrum of identity with refreshing courage and compassion.” —Bryan Stevenson, New York Times bestselling author of Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption A fearless memoir in which beloved and bestselling How to Raise an Adult author Julie Lythcott-Haims pulls no punches in her recollections of growing up a black woman in America. Bringing a poetic sensibility to her prose to stunning effect, Lythcott-Haims briskly and stirringly evokes her personal battle with the low self-esteem that American racism routinely inflicts on people of color. The only child of a marriage between an African-American father and a white British mother, she shows indelibly how so-called "micro" aggressions in addition to blunt force insults can puncture a person's inner life with a thousand sharp cuts. Real American expresses also, through Lythcott-Haims’s path to self-acceptance, the healing power of community in overcoming the hurtful isolation of being incessantly considered "the other." The author of the New York Times bestselling anti-helicopter parenting manifesto How to Raise an Adult, Lythcott-Haims has written a different sort of book this time out, but one that will nevertheless resonate with the legions of students, educators and parents to whom she is now well known, by whom she is beloved, and to whom she has always provided wise and necessary counsel about how to embrace and nurture their best selves. Real American is an affecting memoir, an unforgettable cri de coeur, and a clarion call to all of us to live more wisely, generously and fully.