Green Options

I have used brown paper bags in the past to rewrap boxes for shipping, but I never thought of making shipping envelopes from brown bags.  This genius packaging idea reuses plastic grocery bags for waterproofing and brown paper bags to make the outer envelope.  My favorite part is the stitching to close it up.  No glue or tape necessary!

I have just finished making an entire stack of freakin’ AWESOME Valentines for my Valentine’s Classroom Card Exchange swap over at Craftster, and the last thing I intend to do with them is stick them into a bunch of boring, mass-market, chlorine bleached, old-growth forest envelopes. And also? I made my Valentines weird sizes.

I am a crafty chick, however, and as my friend Autumn says, happiness IS recycling folded paper, so I’m going to take this atlas I found dumpster-diving, in which the Berlin Wall (Boo!) and Tibet (Yay!) are both alive and well, and I’m going to fold some pages into rockin’ envelopes to house all my many missives to all my many Internet sweeties (You out there, superhooker? Pumpkinbear says hi!).

Why don’t you give your own sweetie a smile and craft along with me?

So this might not technically be a fabric, but it is so very cool none-the-less. Loop by MIO is a textile like material that can be used for virtually any project that you can think up.

It is made from Tyvek, a water proof material that is polyethylene based. It can be cut, sewn, wrinkled, folded, pierced, hung or hemmed like a fabric. I’m also convinced that this is another alternative to vinyl, which is really quite awesome.

Another fantastic property that this fabric comes with is its own envelope for recycling. With each order of loop, it is accompanied with a prepaid envelope for shipping your scraps or your project (when it is no longer wanted or needed) back to MIO for recycling! In wonky terms it is a “free product take back system.”