Green Options

If you love the luxury of thick, textured handmade paper for your crafty needs then you should check out Twisted Limb Paperworks.

Whether you make cards, scrapbook or just need some scrap paper for your craft needs they have a great selection of high quality, eco-friendly handmade paper made from recycled paper.

Looking at these lovely fabric gift bag samples from Lucky Crow makes me wonder why everyone doesn’t use such crafty, beautiful and reusable bags during the holidays.

Sure some people really need that wrapping paper rip to feel like they are opening a gift but these bags are so beautiful they are a gift themselves.

According to Gift Bags Gone Green every year Americans spend more than $5 billion dollars on gift wrap, bags, and tissue paper of which the majority ends up in landfills.

To offer a unique and green approach to the gift wrap industry Gift Bags Gone Green have created fun and funky fabric gift bags that are washable and reusable. The bags are not only green because they are reusable but they are made from upcycled, reused, and vintage fabrics.

Abe’s Market, a new online natural marketplace, is about to launch and is looking for the latest and greatest natural products to create the best array of products for the site.

Abe’s will offer a comprehensive selection of all natural products, with the best and latest in health, beauty, food, home and consumer goods with the ease and convenience of the most modern e-commerce services. The site aims to be a place for customers to find their favorite natural brands as well as a place to discover some of the newest and unique undiscovered lines, as well as “meet” the creators of the brands and gain knowledge about the ingredients, processes and stories behind these products.

In addition to being the source for purchasing all-natural goods, Abe’s Market will be the place and opportunity for up and coming producers of natural products to feature, market, and grow their brands. Abe’s will continually seek out new brands and welcome new sellers to the site. Additionally, the Abe’s Market management team led by co-founders Richard Demb and Jon Polin, who have their professional experience in both natural businesses and the retail environment, will help these newer brands gain exposure with natural retailers to establish distribution.

As you may have noticed we’re smitten with our glorious handmade skinnyskinny soaps featured below:

This season I also noticed the Green and Clean Guild of Esty handmade soap makers have some fabulous summer soother recipes. Another bathing beauty crafter I like is Alchemic Muse, a popular Green and Clean Guild member, who makes a fantastic cocoa bee soap:

I looooove the Renegade craft fairs, although only Renegade Chicago is close enough to attend.

One of the great things about visiting the web sites of craft fairs, however, is the vendor list–most artists have a web presence these days, so perusing the list of vendors is one way to check out all the Renegade-worthy artists even if you can’t be there for the ambiance.

Web shops also help me decide where I want to shop in person, if I am attending a craft fair. I like fair trade, natural, and recycled work, which info is generally available at an artist’s web site, so I don’t have to feel bad about grilling a super-busy vendor in a super-busy booth on the opening day of a major craft fair.

So, nope, I wasn’t able to make it across the entire country to visit San Francisco for Renegade (although I’ll be there in about three weeks, darnit!), but here are some of my favorite vendors who were there without me:

Waaaaaaaay back in December, you might remember I wrote my representatives a letter about the CPSIA of 2008. As a small crafter of children’s items and a consumer of handmade goods for myself and my children, I was extremely worried about the stringent testing requirements called for in the Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act. Specifically, I envisioned a future in which only a few huge manufacturers (the same ones, perhaps, whose outsourcing caused the lead scandals in the first place?) could afford to put children’s items on the market, and in which thrift stores and libraries were cleared out of children’s items entirely. Considering I only buy handmade or second-hand, that’s a problem for me.

If you sew your own (or others) cloth diapers, does that make you a crafter or an eco-conscious Mama?  Of course, it makes you both.

Here are directions to make super cute diapers out of t-shirts.  How’s that for a reclaiming project?  The best part is you can put the fun saying or cute part of the shirt right onto babies bum!

Need some liners for inside the diapers, here’s a tutorial for that.

How about making your own felted wool covers out of second hand sweaters?

Need to know where to find diaper making fabrics and kits, here’s a link.  (Stay with us after the jump to find out more about the adorable diaper in the photo.)

Editor’s note: The opinions in this post do not reflect those of Crafting a Green World as a whole or other writers on the CAGW team.

It can be hard to be an indie crafter these days. Perhaps Oilily will steal your designs and resell them as cheap knock-offs, perhaps somebody will smear your name all over the Internet because you disagree about the usage of the word craftivism, perhaps someone else will comment on one of your blog posts and call you retarded because you object to wool felt.

And then, just when you’re feeling better about all of that, Etsy will steal some of your hard-earned money.

What’s up with that, Etsy?

Now, I understand that technology is complicated. And I understand that Internet Explorer, although it’s the standard browser that most people, especially the internet un-savvy (Hi, mom!), use, basically blows. And I understand that when Internet Explorer updates, or Bill Gates sneezes, or the stars misalign, web sites tend to go all to hell for a while until some other programmer writes a fix.

This place is not your grandma’s pottery painting studio, I’ll tell you that much.

In Wisconsin for Matt’s grandma’s garage sale, the family and I took a couple of days to recover up in Door County. Along with cheese curds, beaches, and dairy farms, we spent half a day at the Hands on Art Studio in Fish Creek.

Holy cow.

For a lady who loves to dabble in anything DIY, who hates cookie cutter crafting, and who plans to move everyone out to a farm before the eldest baby is more than a decade old (I’m speaking of myself, here), the Hands On Art Studio? Was awesome.

I love vintage glass. I have a few hoarded bottles and unique finds that are currently stashed away so my kids don’t break them. Eventually I will have all my antiques displayed around my home and not stuffed in boxes…after the kids have grown up.

If I displayed everything now it would just get broken. But broken glass pieces don’t always get wasted. There are many artists who have found creative ways to turn broken glass into works of art. Some make mosaics, others make new bottles, glasses or tumblers, and some, like Laura Bergman of Bottled Up Designs , make pretty pieces of jewelry.