Choosing Bamboo Flooring

LiterateObsessions writes about choosing bamboo flooring for his home:

We’ve decided we’re going to go with bamboo. It’s harder than most other woods, and it’s very good looking. It’s also a little more expensive than the standard oaks and pines, but we’ve decided it’s worth it.

We’ll be tearing up the carpet and old sub-floor ourselves, then have a contractor come in and do the installation, since I have a pathological fear of floor glue… No, not really, it’s just that we want to make sure it’s done right.

This will involve moving a lot of our stuff around. Very probably, we’ll need to truck some of it somewhere else for a few days, especially the stuff in the living room. It’s a pain in the ass, but it’s gotta be done.

Decorating with Bamboo

Decorating ideas using bamboo:

Another good material for decorating your house and art looks for interior design such as in the living room, dining room, bed room and also kithen room is Bamboo fabric. In this article you will learn something about this material. The purpose is to know better the bamboo products.

Bamboo fabrics and starchy pulp are made from bamboo that grows widely throughout Asian countries. Starchy pulp is a refined product of bamboo stems and leaves through a process of hydrolysis-alkalization and multi-phase bleaching. Chemical fiber factories then process it into bamboo fiber.

Bamboo fabrics are made from pure bamboo fiber yarns which have excellent moisture vapor transmission properties. Bamboo fiber is a unique biodegradable textile material. Bamboo fiber comes from nature and completely returns to nature in the end. It is praised as the natural, green, and eco-friendly textile material of the 21st century.

Bamboo Steamers

NovaTownHall writes about bamboo steamers:

If you don’t have a trusted local source for fresh vegetables, here’s how you use commercially produced vegetables: Get yourself a simple steamer set up, which is a metal or bamboo grate that you put vegetables in, and then put in a large sauce pan. Put an inch of water in the pan and boil the whole deal, covered, for 8 minutes. That’s your vegetables.

When you go out to eat, forego the salad, and order a nice, cooked appetizer, and have steamed vegetables with your meal. “Salads” should be viewed as skeptically as you would view sushi. It’s just the way it is.

Bamboo Ornaments

Ipoh Food talks about bamboo ornaments:

To maintain its authenticity, the House of Ipoh uses fresh and natural ingredients, and imports some ingredients, such as shrimp paste, directly from Ipoh.

Served as an appetizer, Rojak Ipoh (made from selected fresh fruits, including pineapple and guava, in shrimp paste) is one of the original dishes from Ipoh.

Rojak or rujak is also popular in Indonesia and is served with a mix of chili, peanut and palm sugar sauce, and usually eaten as dessert.

Besides Rojak, the restaurant offers deep-fried shrimp with mixed fruit salad, deep-fried Wonton served with sweet and sour sauce, deep-fried squid with spiced salt, deep-fried dough fritters filled with shrimps paste or deep-fried spring rolls.

The restaurant, with its ethnic minimalist design with wooden furniture, bamboo ornaments and black dominant color, also serves various soups, such as beef ball or beef tendon ball soup, claypot chicken in yellow wine, ginger soup and clay pot beef tripe soup.

Green Houses

JetsonGreen writes about green buiding features including using bamboo flooring:

These loft-style, urban homes will have the following: grid-tied 3 kilowatt photovoltaic system installed by Namaste Solar Electric; two solar thermal collectors for hydronic baseboard heat + domestic hot water; tightly built, 2×6 framing; spray foam + wet-blown cellulose insulated envelope;Solar_row_costs_box_1 heat recovery ventilators/whole-house fans for ventilation; tankless water heaters; bamboo flooring, Trex decking, + recycled pop-bottle carpeting; low-E windows; Energy Star appliances; dual-flush toilets; programmable thermostats; low-VOC interior paints; and close proximity to mass transportation. While these green homes will be about $15-20 per square foot more than traditional code-built homes, that cost would be even greater without the Xcel Energy rebates (+ Colorado Amendment 37) that helps the development company get back almost two thirds of the solar system’s cost. Sans rebates, photovoltaics would not be economically feasible.

Bamboo Cutting Boards

NavelGazer writes about bamboo cutting boards:

spiral notebook made from a 1951 yearbook, The Scepter; chocolate-liqueur cordials; new music!; Apples to Apples board game; caramels and chocolate truffles handmade by een; a super-solid Calphalon bread knife and pretty bamboo cutting board; Purdy’s chocolate hedgehogs; Bissinger’s chocolate-covered molasses lollies; beautiful earrings and necklace of silver and handmade glass beads.

Pandas Are Picky Eaters

Physorg writes:

The animals’ diet consists almost entirely of bamboo, but they will eat only about 20 of the 200 or so species that grow in Georgia. What type they like also varies by the time of year. Sometimes the pandas will eat nothing but one variety for a week, then refuse to eat it anymore. (Sound familiar, parents?)

And the bamboo has to be fresh – the pandas turn up their noses at dry or wilted leaves and discolored stalks.

So the zoo relies on a bamboo hunting team to find and harvest local patches of the plant. The bamboo they collect cannot be grown with pesticides or near polluted waterways. And most important, it must be appetizing to the pandas.

Bamboo grows wild – and fast, like a weed – in many parts of the country. The Atlanta zoo could, of course, grow its own, but that would not be very practical, given the pandas’ ever-changing tastes.

“They might eat golden bamboo from Mr. Smith’s yard but they won’t eat it from Mr. Jones’ yard,” said Jan Fortune, manager of the zoo’s animal nutrition department.

The finicky black-and-white animals are native to China’s Sichuan Province. Lun Lun, the female, weighs around 250 pounds; Yang Yang, the male, is closer to 300 pounds. Each panda eats 20 to 30 pounds of bamboo a day. The leaves and stalks account for about 95 percent of their diet. (They also get soy biscuits and apples as treats.)

That means that the bamboo hunters have to haul in about 400 pounds of bamboo each week to provide enough food for the pandas and a few other zoo animals, like the elephants and gorillas, that also eat the plants.

Bamboo Bags

Snazzy Finds writes about bamboo bags:

This pretty tote by Black Bags is made of 100% cotton and has three interior pockets top elastic and covered button closure two Natural bamboo handles, and reinforced flat bottom.The tote also comes with a matching pouch. Vintage Upholstery Handbag cost $49.00 at Black Bags’s Etsy shop.

Bamboo Products

Design Boston writes:

The Traveled Home features items from Asia, Africa, and the Pacific Islands. I particularly like the bamboo products (a fast growing tree, bamboo is a truly sustainable product), and the Buddha statues (I have a growing interest in Buddhism, so that may explain it). All of the pieces are made by local artisans, so buying a piece from TTH has a more direct impact on promoting a global economy than buying something that was made in a Chinese factory.

Bamboo Yarn Knitting

This blog writes about knitting with bamboo yarn:

Of course if you are a knitter like Blue Gal (and Figleaf, the guy in the picture who did indeed knit that sweater, in silk, ohgodohgodohgod….)

…then I’m afraid you noticed the sweater first. Are the stitches in those cables twisted? Is that plain ol’ trinity stitch in the center panel, ’cause it looks like there might be some little yarnovers, but then again, it could be the yarn. What size needles? Do you have any problem with the silk worming (it’s a knitting term) or felting? What about tension? How much give does silk have? Is it pure silk, or is there cotton or ramie or bamboo blended in?