Requesting Submissions for "30th Anniversary" Logo

In 2010 we will be able to add to our list of accomplishments thirty years of inspiring people through hands-on education in building and design. Thus, in effort to celebrate our coming of age we are now soliciting design submissions for our 30th Anniversary logo. The prize for a selected design, aside from the glory, is a free one-week Yestermorrow class! The guidelines for entries are as follows:

-Your design should be inspired by Yestermorrow and incorporate some mention of the 30th Anniversary. Additionally it should take the opportunity to riff on, adjust, or completely rethink the logo, suggesting a coming of age.

-Your design should be printable on t-shirt (one-sided). It should be monochromatic or two-tone. And be universally attractive, something that everyone non-Yestermorrow folk would want to wear.

-It would be great if your submission is in some Adobe format (like Photoshop, Illustrator, or PDF). Submissions should be no larger than 5mb. If selected we will contact you for a higher resolution copy.

-Your design should be completely original.


Have fun, and we look froward to seeing your entries. Deadline for submission to jose(@)yestermorrow.org is Decemeber 31st, 2009.


(We can send you an Adobe Illustrator or Photoshop t-shirt template to get you started and/or our style guide)

Thinking About Energy

This week has brought a flurry of thought to Yestermorrow about energy. On Tuesday I attended the monthly meeting of the LocalVolts- the energy subcommittee of the Valley Futures Network. One of the volunteers unveiled the Mad River Valley Energy Wiki- an amazingly information-filled resource about energy-related projects happening around here. There are folks looking at biomass- how much wood could we sustainably harvest from within the valley, and how would we distribute it; others are looking at energy conservation and weatherization; still more are interested in barn-raising type events to help homeowners install solar hot water and photovoltaics. Pretty neat!

On Thursday I was lucky enough to tag along with the Farm Design class for the morning on a field trip to see Gaelan and Jasna Brown's experimental woodchip water heater affectionately nicknamed "the brown mound". Based on what's called the "Jean Pain Method" they have created a large packed pile of wet woodchips with a coil of 1" water pipe in the middle which preheats the water coming out of their well before it goes into their hot water heater. So far he's been getting water out at 120 degrees F. In addition to domestic hot water, they're hoping eventually they could use it for space heating as well. Gaelan has been blogging and documenting the whole process in order to help spread the word about this fascinating low-tech system- check it out!

Back at Yestermorrow everyone was buzzing over lunch about how we might get involved here at the school. One possibility is to run a workshop with Gaelan next summer and create a woodchip pile for the Chalet's hot water. While the current focus on campus is getting our solar hot water system and PV array installed this winter, we also started talking about how we could transition to solid fuels for heating our main building (right now we have high efficiency propane boilers). That's a bigger project, obviously, but one worth starting to think about as we plan our campus expansion. On November 23rd from 7-9 pm we'll host a free Button Up Vermont workshop for the local community to learn about energy conservation and money saving techniques to weatherize your home. The interns have been tackling the Chalet (certainly a weatherization challenge) and already it's more comfortable and better equipped for the dropping temperatures to come, and we've started replacng our 30-year old donated refrigerators with new Energy Star rated models, amongst other energy efficiency improvements.

Yestermorrow goes solar

After years of dreaming about how we could produce more of our own energy, we're thrilled to be implementing two major renewable energy projects on the Yestermorrow campus.

In September we learned we'd been awarded one of the Vermont Community Climate Change Grants to install a solar hot water system for our domestic hot water use (kitchen, showers, etc). We've received $11,850 from the state for this project, and are partnering with instructor Bevan Walker and Alteris Renewables to design the system which we hope to install in the next couple of months. It will include 6 flat plate collectors mounted on the east side of the roof of the main building and a couple hundred gallons of super insulated storage tanks in the basement. In addition to lessening our fossil fuel consumption (we currently use propane to heat our hot water), we are also hoping this project will provide an educational demonstration site for people interested in learning more about solar hot water systems. We'll have informative signage on all the equipment and will run a solar hot water workshop in conjunction with the installation, so stay tuned for more details on that learning opportunity.

On Friday we also signed an agreement with Earth Turbines in Williston, VT to install a 32kW photovoltaic array at Yestermorrow. This installation through their All Sun Trackers lease program allows us to purchase the solar energy produced by the PV panels through net metering via a 5-year lease. The 32kW installation is expected to generate close to 45,000 kWh of electricity per year- enough to cover Yestermorrow's annual electricity consumption for the entire campus. The panels are what's known as "solar trackers"- ground mounted panels which move with the sun across the sky to maximize the amount of energy they create. We're currently in the process of finalizing the tracker locations, permitting and obtaining a certificate of public good from the state of VT, but if all goes well we'll have the panels installed by the end of the year.

We'll be documenting both projects extensively and posting photos to the blog as we move forward.

"Less is More" Instructor Featured in Dwell Magazine

"Less is More" instructor, Andreas Stavropoulos recently featured in Dwell Magazine.

RE:Shade - October 9th, 5:30p

Instructor and friend Dee Nicholas will be showing her installation RE:Shade at UPenn in the Philly Works exhibit. Please join her for the open house this Friday October 9th, from 5:30p - 11p at Meyerson Hall (34th & Spruce in Philadelphia).

Part of the genesis of this project was an installation at Yestermorrow last summer, using this found materials-based process as part of the work.

For more on the work visit her website: http://reshadow.blogspot.com

Yestermorrow Featured in New York Times "T Magazine" design issue

We were thrilled to host journalist Mark Rozzo back in July for a few days on campus, and he wrote a great article about Yestermorrow for the New York Times T Magazine. The issue is finally hitting newsstands this weekend (Sunday 10/4 issue), but if you want a sneak preview, the article "Hammer Time" is online--http://www.nytimes.com/indexes/2009/10/04/style/t/index.html#pageName=04yestermorrow

Moose Sighting!

Dave Warren, our facilities manager, took some sweet shots of a moose near the intern chalet.

The big fella walked right up to him...

...and then went casually on his way.

A Day in the Life of Yestermorrow

We were lucky to have local photographer Spencer Leonard of Warren come by last week to capture some of our classes in action and campus during fall foliage. Check out these wonderful shots!

Nina Dubois: LAND/ART 2009

Thank you to Yestermorrow alumna Nina Dubois for sharing photos of her most recent site project at the University of New Mexico Art Museum. Dispersal/Return: Land Arts of the American West 2000–2006 is an open exhibit that runs from August 28 – November 25, 2009 and has commissioned Nina for her piece, in collaboration with Jeanette Hart-Mann, entitled Culture Digest(e). The piece is a site-specific art laboratory that explores the waste stream of the University of New Mexico campus and its potential to be creatively diverted and reimagined. Designed as a passive solar greenhouse, the project functions as a repository where cultural artifacts such as office memos, newspapers, food waste, and landscape debris are collected and photographed. For more images of this project visit her album: http://tiny.cc/VXtY8