ALPHINGTON scouts are calling on the community to help them raise funds to raise the roof.

The 1st Alphington Scout Group, which last year celebrated its 100th year, is having a designers and makers market to raise money to contribute to the $200,000 renovation its beloved hall requires.

Parent committee chairman Geoff Glynn said urgent repairs were required to save the hall, which had sections of its roof collapsing.

He said little work had been done the since families of workers at Amcor paper mill built it in the early 1900s.

“The building has great character and it’s worth spending money on it to fix it up and pass on a legacy to the next generation of users,” Mr Glynn said.

“We’ve got a five-year plan in place and we need $200,000 to carry it out.”

Yarra Council committed $15,000 from its 2011/2012 budget to the project and promised a further $15,000 in each of the next two years.

Mr Glynn said Scouts Victoria would contribute, but the Alphington group would still need to raise about $70,000.

While some scout groups are reporting declining memberships, 1st Alphington is a strong unisex group boasting more than 40 members.

“The kids do some fantastic activities like cross country skiing,” Mr Glynn said.

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MELBURNIANS will have less room to kick the footy, walk the dog or take personal training sessions in coming years as population pressure squeezes the city’s cherished public open spaces.

A ground-breaking report released today by the Victorian Environmental Assessment Council warns that public open space, such as local parks, gardens and public golf courses will have to cater for communities swelling by more than 1500 new residents a week.

”Public open space per capita is likely to decrease over time for almost all municipalities,” the report concluded. It looked at 29 metropolitan councils.

Population growth in areas such as Bayside, Brimbank, Glen Eira and Moonee Valley had already exceeded population projections for 2016, the report noted. ”The community perceives that Melbourne’s increasing population will result in a loss of quantity and quality of public open space,” the report commissioned by the state government found.

”Without the retention and creation of public open space on both public land and local council land, public open space per capita will decrease over time for almost all municipalities in the investigation area.”

The report recommends the Baillieu government prepare a ”metropolitan open space policy and strategy that provides a long-term plan for public open space” and maintains ”an open space inventory” to keep track of open space.

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You’ll have to go to Paris to see it and you can only skate it if you’re a professional.

The PAS House was designed so that everything on the inside, from the walls to the furniture, can be skated on.

It’s a curvy indoor playground where you can get air in the lounge, carve your way over the kitchen and grind along bench tops, and nobody will tell you to go and play outside.

The Paris display of the PAS House is actually only a full-scale model of one room of the house. The good news, for the professionals, is that it’s all skateable.

The professionals have been called in to put the design to the test. If all goes well, the real thing will be built on the top of the Las Flores Canyon in Malibu, California.

The man behind the design, Pierre-André Senizergues, is described as a "super-rich skateboarding GOD" by TMZ. He has some serious skating cred from years as a world-class professional during the 80s.

He’s also made a fortune from skate shoes, clothes and accessories. His latest venture is skateboard-inspired furniture which you can see in the pictures from the Paris display.

The world-first live-in designer skate ramp should be ready for Senizergues to move into some time in 1212.

FITZROY is warming people’s heads and hearts with a quirky show of more than 300 beanies.

Now in its 11th year, the Artisan Books Beanie Exhibition features beanies from all over Australia.

A self-confessed beanie fanatic, Artisan Books owner Dan Ablethorpe said the exhibition always gets people smiling.

“The whole place is awash with colour,” Mr Ablethorpe said.

“Everyone loves a good beanie and at this time of the year they go down very well.”

He said the beanies on display were very creative and covered a wide range of knitting techniques, styles and patterns.

Penny O’Neill – who has been making beanies for 25 years and has 40 on display – said she used freeform crochet to make “wild and colourful” creations. She said she was excited to see Melburnians celebrate the beanie.

“It’s not just a humble knitted hat,” she said. “It’s a piece of art, it’s quirky, and no two are alike.”

Artisan Books Beanie Exhibition, 159 Gertrude St, Fitzroy, until July 30. Details: artisan.com.au

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SHOP windows in the CBD will come alive this week as weird and wacky installations take over.

Thousands of lit-up ping-pong balls, giant bubbles and painted mechanical wheels will be used by city traders to attract passers-by as part of the annual Look.Stop.Shop exhibition.

Boutique fashion store Obus on Flinders Lane will join 28 other shops taking part in the exhibition.

Designer Shayli Harrison, 22, said she was given free rein to create something eye-catching at Obus.

“Some people find it quite startling but I wanted to create something bright that tied in with people riding around in Melbourne, which is quite beautiful,” Harrison said.

Her bright sculpture, which she describes as “metal flowers,” combines ten fluoro bike wheels with metal eyes.

Maps found at stateofdesign.com.au will direct crowds to all of the shop installations around Melbourne.

The moving displays end July 31.

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ARTISTS from Thornbury and Alphington are among finalists in Australia’s richest art prize for young people.

Alphington’s Tom Gibbs, 21, and Thornbury’s Ben Howe, 34, have been selected in the final 25 to contest the $50,000 Metro Gallery Art Award for artists under 35.

They were shortlisted from hundreds of entries, with the winner to be announced by ex-premier Jeff Kennett on July 26.

“Just to be a finalist in such a well-known award and have the opportunity to exhibit my work is wonderful,” Gibbs said.

A fine art student at Victorian College of the Arts, he entered a self-portrait in oils.

“My work explores the notion of human being versus human doing. The question is, at what point does that productivity that aids existence define that existence?

“In a society where my worth is directly linked to what I produce, what does it mean to simply be?”

Gibbs moved from Adelaide to Melbourne to work with homeless people for the Salvation Army.

“I’d had a sheltered upbringing and wanted to experience harsh realities.”

Howe, who is studying a Master of Fine Art at RMIT, entered an oil and acrylic painting titled Time and The Elastic, painted with overlapping layers of paint to show the passing of time from one moment to the next.

The exhibition runs until July 30 at the Metro Gallery, 1214 High St, Armadale.

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TREE prunings will be collected from inner-city homes and fed to Melbourne Zoo’s elephants under a radical recycling plan.

The Parkville zoo is offering to send horticulturalists to properties to cut and collect branches and plants that are compatible with the diets of its seven elephants.

Two four-tonne trucks will patrol the streets on Tuesdays and Fridays to identify appropriate tree and plant species.

Simon Andrews from the zoo’s horticulture department said elephants loved to snack on species such as bamboo, acacia, elm and the appropriately named elephant grass.

He said the five adults and two calves had such voracious appetites – consuming dozens of two-metre long branches each week as well as fruit, hay and lucerne – that it was difficult for staff to keep up with demand. He said the gentle giants also used the greenery for bedding in their enclosure.

“This is partly a call for help, as we need as many branches as we can get our hands on,” Mr Andrews said.

The City of Melbourne’s sole Greens’ councillor, Cathy Oke, said the zoo’s plan would neatly complement the council’s own recycling program. The council collects a maximum of two cubic metres of green waste for every property each month.

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There are plenty of piano-moving horror stories, precious pianos getting jammed in tight spots, being damaged beyond repair. Consider your back and the poor piano, think about leaving the move in the hands of the professionals.

For piano teacher Heather Hobbs, moving home involves an additional stress — the transporting of her two pianos, which are not only the tools of her trade but also her precious art objects. But so far, so good.

"It’s not as traumatic as you might expect it to be," Heather says. "We only ever had trouble once. We were moving into a place with stairs and the removalists didn’t send enough people. I had a big, old German piano and they couldn’t physically carry it. They were about to drop it, and my husband had to step in quickly to save it. The problem was that the removalists didn’t have a proper piano trolley — they were carrying it on leather straps."

When Heather last moved, she engaged a removalist who not only had the necessary equipment but was also properly covered by insurance.

"In our last house my studio door was opposite the staircase and the removalists had to turn the piano on its side to get it out. I was worried that everything would move inside the instrument, but the technicians knew what they were doing and there were no problems. That’s the advantage of using a proper removalist."

Jessica Merlo of Melbourne-based Piano Moves says that by using a non-specialist to move their piano home owners risk delays on moving day.

"Every day we get people ringing us because they’ve got a settlement deadline of 2:00 p.m. and they’re stuck with their piano because the furniture removalists are unable to move it. The removalist has promised to move it over the phone, without looking at it. Then they turn up and the instrument is bigger or heavier than they realised, there are steps, or it as to go up or down stairs, and they say they can’t move it.

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Before unpacking….

Imagine moving house one day, and by that evening every room in your new home has been set up and expertly arranged.

Ever moved while juggling children and pets, had last minute packing dramas or spent days in a forest of half unpacked boxes looking for lost items? Had an elderly relative interstate or overseas that needed help moving?

You can avoid all the dramas of packing and unpacking as well as the horrors of disassembling your old home and then reassembling your new one, with the help of a packing and unpacking service company.

Susan Williams of The Finishing Touch in Melbourne says inexperienced packers can take a full day to pack each room, and two days for the kitchen or for the garage and garden items; and the same amount of time to unpack it again.

…and after.

“These days people are too busy to worry about the hassle of moving,” Susan says.  “We can come in and transform a chaotic, carton-filled house into a beautiful liveable home in just one day.”

Susan believes she was the first to come up with the concept of an unpacking service when she set up The Finishing Touch in 1994. 

“To the best of my knowledge, it was the first such service in world. I visited England and New York to see if they had anything like it, but they hadn’t."

"I couldn’t believe the service didn’t already exist. I’d been working at one of the major removalists, and realised that clients were unhappy when the removalists left their new house in a fair amount of chaos, full of boxes. 

“People were calling out for someone to help them, and they really wanted ladies who knew how to set up houses – where things go in kitchens, bathrooms, how to make beds, organise wardrobes and get all their belongings sorted so they could settle in as quickly as possible. It’s a big change from a typical blokey, men-in-trucks removalist service!”

Both The Finishing Touch and the Sydney-based Moving House “White Glove” unpacking service employ teams of mostly mature-aged women, who’ve had careers, but no longer want to work full-time.

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Sporting clubs across Victoria are uniting in July to face their toughest opponent yet – cancer.

Call To Arms is the Cancer Council’s annual national event to raise funds and awareness of cancer, a disease that effects 1 in 2 men by the age of 85.

If you’re keen to take part, all you have to do is nominate a day any time in July to hold a Call To Arms match where the players in your club wear a yellow armband in a show of support to men who have survived cancer, those currently facing the cancer fight and to remember mates who have lost their lives to cancer.

All money raised goes to the Cancer Council.

Any sporting club can join, so register at www.calltoarms.com.au or call 1300 65 65 85, and help save the lives of men right across the country.

From: Friday 1st of July 2011  To  Sunday 31st of July 2011

Web Links:

www.calltoarms.com.au

www.cancervic.org.au