Petition: Styrofoam Tarys out of Schools
STYROFOAM FOOD TRAYS OUT OF NYC PUBLIC SCHOOLS NOW!
Go to sosnyc.org and sign the petition to stop the use of this product in the public school system.
And while I have your attention, here’s a readily available alternative for both home and commercial use, check out the products at the World Centric site.
Goody Bags Gone Bad?
Party favor bags and the stuff inside of them are usually full of inexpensive plastic toys and the worst kind of candy. Additionally, these party favor bags can become rather costly to put together. And while I personally would do away with the tradition altogether, my 5-year daughter is less motivated to start a revolution. So with Halloween parties drawing near, I thought I would come up with my own line of goodie party bags as an alternative to the plastic, store variety. And just as an FYI, I filled my bags with organic lollipops and crayons.
And here is a short list of less healthier and greener alternatives to the traditional party favors:
Holiday Gift Bags
Taking a cue from the fashion industry, I started to work on my holiday gift wrap in July. I knew if I wanted to have photos for postcards and for other promotions that my designs would have to be finalized and prototyped by the time September rolled around. As such, I started to consider the kind of imagery that best represented the holidays to me.
I started with a fun idea to use vintage rubber stamp imagery and found some great ones on online. After getting theses stamps in my hands and inked I quickly decided that that path was not right for the statement I wanted to convey. The stamps were fun and iconic, but were small and would require a patterned repetition, which was not what I was after.
Also, I decided that I wanted my holiday wrap to be nondenominational, as such the vintage Christmas no longer applied. And after working with small stamps, I also decided that I wanted a larger, bolder image to represent the season and not multiple little images. For inspiration I turned to nature and some interesting imagery found in several plant anatomy books that I have from Dover Press.
Now it was a matter of technique. While stamping offers great flexibility and fun, I felt that I needed to experiment with other reproduction techniques and tinkered with silk screen printing, block printing and stenciling… the latter being what I settled on for this particular design.
I am very happy with my process and where I settled. I think that the graphic is large and bold, albeit not invasive. It works for the two sizes I am producing for this line, that being the small apparel gift-bag and the media bag. It also works on muslin, silk and even the candy-cane stripped remnant fabric I hope to include in this holiday season’s line up.
Here is the gallery of photographs for my 2009 wrapping cloth line, I hope you like them.
