Herbivores, biodegradeable zippers and Athens, oh my!

Yes, this post will be random, you’ve been warned.

First! This weekend, SuperCute! will be truckin’ it up to Athens for the Craftstravaganzaa!!!

Then, we’ll be rushing back home for Youngblood’s Grand Opening Party!!

In sustainable sewing news, I ran across these the other day. So far, they appear to only be in Europe, but I’m still hunting.

First: Zippers made from recycled plastics.

Second: Biodegradeable Zippers! (break down in your compost bin, wow)

So.Cool.

And while I’m linking, here’s a great article that pretty much sums up why I’m mostly vegetarian, and how I feel about people who make fun of me for it: http://www.slate.com/id/2190872
excerpt:
“Please don’t try to convince us that being vegetarian is somehow wrong. … If you want to have an amiable tête-à-tête about vegetarianism, that’s great. But if you insist on being the aggressive blowhard who takes meatlessness as a personal insult and rails about what fools we all are, you’re only going to persuade me that you’re a dickhead.”

oh look, here’s a cute kitten picture!

 

Notes from Inman Park

Remember these guys?

Well, Sunday it rained at the festival, and while we were wondering if it would ever stop, this girl came in and bought some skirts from me. She turned my day right around when she said our homeade shopping bags were so cool she thought she might cry. It just felt so good to know that the effort we put in was appreciated and that other people understood what we were trying to accomplish.
Then, just like that, the sun came out and the rest of the day was awesome.
——-
(There might also have been cupcakes and beer, but that’s a whole other post. )

 

Mission:Possible!

So every week or so, the ladies of SuperCute! get together to work on crafty projects. It’s a little different than a regular craft night because we aren’t working on personal projects. Instead, we try and collaborate on projects that will help us make a difference in the world. We call these project nights Mission:Possible! because we really do think that all it takes is showing people how things can easily be different, and if the results are cute to boot? Well it’s just that much better!

Last night we worked on making shopping bags for the upcoming Inman Park Festival. Originally, we’d planned to make them out of newspaper, but we realized that if we made them out of something a little sturdier, perhaps people would use them for all their day’s purchases and not use any plastic bags at all. Maybe, just maybe, they would even continue to use them for errands beyond the festival! (I think I would just faint right on the floor out of joy if I ever saw one of our bags in Target. srsly.)

Anyway, Becky likes to use vintage sheets for parts of her lunch sets, and sometimes those come in sets. This means there’s always a bunch leftover because who wants 74 lunch kits out of the same fabric? haha. So, we started working our way thru her leftovers.

These are just a simple rectangular shape, with stitched sides and triangles sewn into the bottom to give it what would be a grovery-bag shape if it were paper. The softness of the fabric makes them hang like hobo bags, which we sort of really dig. The straps are scraps from either the edges of pillowcases, or just leftover strips of fabric from our pile that are too small to use for much else. These are simply sewn freebies that will hopefully get a few uses from our customers. I think we’ll even offer a discount on future purchases if they bring the bag back to be refilled, hahaha.

First, wash and iron!

next: sew!!!

third, put on handles!

finished bags!

 

Craftivism

Anyone following this blog knows one of my side projects is SuperCute!, which is a collaborative project with Becky and Liz. One of the things we feel really strongly about is using our crafting to try and make a difference in the way people think about their day to day lives and habits. We call it Craftivism, but that term can mean different things to different people, so we thought maybe we would take a moment to write a little bit about what that word meant to us as individuals. Everyone’s responses will be up over at the SuperCute! blog, but I thought I’d also put mine here…

_____________
In the most obvious sense, to me Craftivism means Activism, as expressed by Crafting.
I think a big part of it is showing people how their lives can be different by doing things themselves, or by changing their habits to ones that are not only more sustainable, but prettier and more personalized, and just more fun! Craftivism is a way to combat the mass-marketing media, and to really express yourself and your beliefs. I also think a big chunk of it revolves around supporting a different type of economy, a smaller, more local one which by default has less impact overall as well as more transparency and acountability.

 

Bubble Mailer tutorial over in SuperCute! blog

For all you sustainability nuts, I posted a make-your-own-bubble-mailers from recycled materials tutorial over in the SuperCute! blog:
tutorial!

 

How Dare we be Optimistic?

Al Gore has done a new slideshow presentation on climate change. It’s an updated version, with new data and information. It’s 27 minutes long, and more than a little terrifying, but worth the watch.

One thing he says which really strikes me is that he “challenges us to act with a sense of “generational mission” — the kind of feeling that brought forth the civil rights movement — to set it right.”

It gets hard to stay optimistic sometimes, when we’re bogged down by fixing the roof, paying the bills, dealing with the crime in our neighborhood… trying to simply live in the world we live in. It gets frustrating when I have to make choices where none of the available options seem like the right one, and the best option is simply out of my price range. It often feels like an insurmountable challenge when even some of my peers view my efforts to live ethically as either crazy, pointless, or worse - see it as a threat to their own ways of living or as a personal attack on their choices.

Then I think about how important this is, and the only option I can ethically choose is to keep on trying to get the message out. It’s ok if people don’t understand today, maybe they will tomorrow.

http://www.ted.com/talks/view/id/243

 

a day in the life

So today has been spent mostly working on skirts for my spring collection, but I took a little break and wandered over to my neighborhood secondhand shop and boy am I glad I did! I found this vintage (I think 50’s, but not entirely sure…) silk chinese-style dress. It’s handmade and appears to be hand beaded, I’m pretty sure it was someone’s wedding dress. It’s absolutely stunning, and beyond that it fits like it was tailored for me! This made my day, now I just need to send it to the cleaners and come up with an occasion to wear it!

Then I tested a pattern for a shopping bag made from recycled materials. I found a photo in the flickr recycled materials group that gave me the idea, now Becky and I are trying to figure out the best way to make these sturdy enough to hold our larger items. We want to use these at festivals, instead of purchasing shopping bags. We’ll probably use stickers to put the SuperCute! logo on the front, so that we can all three use them. (except we’ll prolly be making minis for Liz’s jewelry)
so far, so good, except I might need to reinforce the handle stitching and make them more square, less rectangular.

 

glass-etching success!

We might have had a little crafty party with a mustache theme. There’ll be a glass-etching tutorial up over on SuperCute! blog as soon as Becky finishes putting it together.

 

Etsy insanity

I just spent the last 10 minutes trying to figure out why on earth the item I had just finished listing wasn’t showing up in my shop.

And then I realized it was because it had sold…
*headdesk*

It’s been that sort of day

 

This is so awesome I don’t even know what to say…

Unfortunately, I’ll be with SuperCute! at the Inman Park Festival, but if you’re local you should check this out!