Green Options

It’s a bit of a random craft, sure–perhaps a little church camp, perhaps a little preschool.

But your church camp and your preschool I’m sure didn’t have the same standards of artistic quality that I do. When I say that you can dye dried pasta, I sure don’t mean that you can dye it some pale color that’s all uneven, anyway, and looks like something a three-year-old should be stringing on elastic cord.

I’m talking about pasta that POPS. I’m talking about bright colors, jewel tones, gorgeous shades of emerald or hot pink that will inspire even you, you jaded crafter you.

Because you know there are some things you totally want to make with this beautiful dried pasta. A mosaic? Some biodegradable jewelry? a chandelier to hang in the kitchen?

Here’s how:

So we’ve all heard of the benefits of the 100 mile diet and have even coined the term locavore, but what about using the same principals and applying them to yarn?

Well, meet Ecological Arts who offers a small amount of handspun, organic and naturally dyed yarns.

Not only are these yarns, handspun, organic and naturally dyed, the fibers are locally sourced as well as the plants used in the dyes.

I had the good fortune to recently visit the Southern hemisphere and explore a good portion of the country of Chile. And in whichever city or town I was in, handmade goods and local artisans and craftsmen were in abundance.

While on the island of Chiloé, the second largest island of Chile, the majority of the artisans sold hand knitted items and hand spun wool. I couldn’t have been more delighted!

Chiloé was a magical place for me, the views of the ocean and rolling farmland with happy and healthy looking cows and sheep and chickens, were such a pleasure to behold. The island holds much lore and is seeped in tradition, with hand spun wool being one of these traditions.

In exploring the markets filled with handmade goods, many of the women would sit and knit, creating their wares as people browsed. Or they would spin. Several had spinning wheels and would spin their wool into yarn, right then and there.

It’s been quite a year here on Crafting a Green World. We’ve learned so much about crafting, reuse, upcycling and how and where to find environmentally friendly supplies. In this column we’ve highlighted some of the leaders in the organic textile movement and found a myriad of fabric options for your eco-friendly crafting needs.

I’d thought I would take a look back over the past year and round up all the great fabric finds for your easy reading pleasure. We discussed why there aren’t more men in organic and sustainable fibers, pondered why bamboo, isn’t so fabulous, and jumped up and down over the prospect that Spoonflower was considering offering organic cotton.

We also reviewed what mainstream stores offer in the way of organic and earth friendly textiles, swore that fabric made from cassette tapes, was not an April fools joke, and learned how to dye fabric with a recipe for natural, non-toxic dye.

We plan to continue to dig up the best in fabulous eco-fabrics for you in 2009, so stay tuned in the new year. Now, on to our textile discoveries from 2008!

Anti-whaling activists aboard the Sea Shepherd vessel ‘Steve Irwin’ have covered a whaling ship with a smelly cocktail of rotten butter, methyl cellulose and indelible dye.

The unconventional sliming operation was carried out in a bid to intimidate the Japanese whaler, Kaiko Maru, into moving out of Australian Antarctic territorial waters. According to Peter Hammarstedt, the Sea Shepherd’s second officer, “this is one stinky, slippery ship.”

I know that I sometimes get carried away with animal fibers here on Crafting a Green World, especially when talking about yarn. I also know that the vegans out there need eco-friendly yarns too! So this one is for you my dear vegan friends.

Nashua Handknits has a Natural Focus Ecologie Cotton yarn perfect for your vegan knitting needs. It is a soft, worsted-weight pima cotton that is dyed using natural materials found all across the Americas, northern Asia, Europe, India and the East Indies.

The soft, natural hues are created with tree bark and various flowers. The color names suggest which ingredient was used to create the color, but you can never be sure. The light Indigo and Curcuma are especially lovely. The yarn has a quiet sheen and luster that helps your stitches pop.

Welcome to the fifth Carnival of Green Crafts!

Another carnival, another bunch of craft-a-licious green goodness.  A bunch of, um, somewhat disturbing craftiness.  Glue sniffing.  Hitting things with sticks.  Metal saws.

What the heck are you people up to out there?

Before we begin, a few administrative notes: The sixth Carnival will head to Canada on October 2nd to be hosted at Smidge! Send in your posts via the carnival submission form today! The Carnival of Green Crafts home page has background info.  And if you missed it, the fourth carnival was at Whip Up and others are linked at the end of this post.

Now on to the carnival!

Don’t forget!  The next Carnival of Green Crafts is Thursday at Whip Up.  Sneak your entry in just under the deadline now!

I started writing the Fabulous Fabrics series here in March, and I thought the six month mark would be a good time for a retrospective.

What I’ve liked best about doing this series is seeing the combination of creativity and passion that goes into what these fabric designers and manufacturers do.  If someone’s making organic fabric, it’s because they believe in it.  It’s not just because a market analysis told them they would make some money.  (In fact, I sometimes worry if they’re even making enough to live on, given the extra work they’re doing to source and use eco-friendly materials and fair trade practices.)  These folks really want to make a difference.

So here are the fabrics and shops I’ve covered so far in the Fabulous Fabrics series here on Crafting A Green World.  At one point I was afraid I would run out, but more and more come to my attention all the time.  So here’s the past, and I’ll see you next Tuesday to start in on the next six months!

Once again, I must give credit to the wonderful Kim of fabric blog True Up for introducing me to an eco-friendlier fabric.  The Andover Vegetable Dyes collection of cottons isn’t made from organic cotton, but it addresses the other side of the green fabric equation: the materials used in dyeing.

Leslie here at Crafting A Green World has talked to us about non-toxic dyeing using natural materials.  This collection is a larger scale equivalent of Leslie using her landlady’s plums to cook up some pretty fabric.

The collection is carried by Z&S Fabrics and Strawberry Patches, and the latter of which has some background information about the collection that is not found on Andover’s website. 

–Don’t forget! Send in your posts for the new Carnival of Green Crafts. Taking submissions now.–

I know that we’ve covered hemp yarn before from Lanaknits and Autumn talked to us about macrame , but it was Leslie’s quest to try natural dye that got me to take a second look at Aurora Silk’s Hemp Yarn.

At first look this yarn from Aurora brings to mind all the stereotypes that Skye talked about when she profiled hemp fabrics. But no it is Not Marijuana.

Hemp yarn is derived from the growth of industrial hemp, a different species of it’s more famous cousin. Industrial hemp grows fast without the need for much pesticides or herbicides. The fiber harvested from the plant is more commonly known as bast. Bast fibers are long and very strong and can be woven or spun to make fabric, rope or yarn.

MIT has perfected a dye technology that could change the solar world as we know it.

The most efficient form of solar technology today is (arguably) extreme concentrated photovoltaics, essentially solar panels placed under a magnifying glass. But the problem with these systems is heat.

Concentrated sunlight can melt silicon solar panels unless you include specialized cooling systems. Cooling technology costs money, and the panels require expensive tracking mechanisms to follow the sun through the day. MIT’s new solar system bypasses the heat and tracking problems all together.

Thin coatings of organic dyes absorb sunlight and redirect favored wavelengths into a pane of glass. The light is aimed and concentrated towards the edge of the pane where small solar panels are located. The concentrated light allows the panels to produce the maximum possible amount of energy all day, every day without cooling systems or complex tracking mechanisms.