She's back...the b*tch is back!

Hello,

My name is bwings and I'm coming back!

Yeah I know, scary picture, but it was the only one I could think of that consisted of me running. Or at least running with great enthusiasm.

After my google ads became suspended and I was no longer able to financially prosper from express research and time I stopped treating this blog like a Monday - Friday and more like "that thing I do when I have some free time. The problem with that is I am unsure of what this free time thing is!

I have not stopped my green living, I've only continued to learn as I've sampled new things, tried out different approaches to life and researched alternatives to things taken for granted. Waste not want not is huge in my house and we are now composters as well.

We are rounding the 5 month mark since I've made my live green resolutions and although I'll go into more detail through the week I can give you a brief update on my successes.

Resolution 1: Reduce waste to one grocery bag a month. So far we have reduced it to one grocery bag a week. Much closer than we thought we'd be in such a short time. Considering we used to be one garbage bag a day! Composting is a huge help in this department.

Resolution 2: Introduce more plant life to the house. I now have a plant for every room. They may not be in every room but there certainly are enough.

Resolution 3: Purchase only paraben free products. check...well except this one thing I purchased on the fly on day and then only a month later realized it had parabens. I thought it was mostly a water item and so didn't look too much into it.

Resolution 4: reduce EDTA in the house. This has been done. Aside from the odd overnight guest perhaps using EDTA shampoos etc. There is no EDTA going down my drains.

Resolution 5: Purchase Bamboo towels. This I actually completed today. I'm excited for them to go in. These are one of the few situations where the eco-friendly option is more expensive. Alas, I wanted to wait for the towels to be on sale. They are currently 45% off, an inarguable price. So in 5-6 business days I should be drying off in eco-friendly luxury.

I can not think of the rest of my resolutions off the top of my head right now, nor what I have been doing to continue to improve my home life and the earth. I'm an avid searcher of ingredients in food as well as cleaning and beauty products now and more understanding of what I'm reading.

What have you been doing in the new year?

Keep me updated, your friendly neighborhood hippie mom. 

K1P1 - Click Click

Hello,

My name is bwings and I resolve to knit!

One of my 365 things for 2011 was to learn to knit. I went out last week on a mission for the appropriate supplies. Organic cotton yarn and bamboo knitting needles. I was surprised to find that the bamboo knitting needles did not cost me more than the plastic ones would have. Snatching up a set of bamboo needles I turned to examine my yarn options. I wasn't in a craft store and unfortunately there weren't many options. Given that I'm going to be making things for my daughter acrylic was the best option based on it's machine-washable quality. I grabbed up two large balls of acrylic yarn in two different shades of pink and proceeded on my merry way.

Given that I didn't find an eco-friendly yarn I thought of a way I could balance it out in my head. Simple, find a way to knit things out of some not-so eco-friendly material. Therefore expanding the life of the garbage and upcycling. Like using old tattered plastic bags as yarn and making a tote. But first I'd have to learn how to make yarn out of the plastic bags. That was easier than coming up with the idea. A quick search found not one but two sites with lovely ideas detailed for you. I'm sure I could find many more. I did some browsing and found a few more cute ideas. One of which was this portable yarn holder set-up using recycled containers.

So what about the question of eco-friendly yarn for next time? Another search a few days later found a few options.

• Repreve - by Unifi was once featured on the discovery channel. It's an innovative 100% recycled polyester yarn made from both post-consumer and post-industrial waste. There is a long list of brands that are already using the like-wool material in their clothing. 
• Blue Sky Alpaca's - Has a large variety of self-sustainable yarn such as Alpaca-silk as well as reycled and organic materials like organic cotton and recycled silk from saris. 
• Eco2Cotton - Produce yarn from recycling new, pre-consumer (post-industrial) cotton knit cuttings. These would be discarded during clothing design and are reprocessed and blended into fiber to be re-spun into yarn. According to their statistics a t-shirt only contains 60% of the cotton grown to produce it. The rest is tossed out on the cutting floor. 
• Cornucopia - Yarn made 100% from corn.
• Bam Boo - Yarn made with Bamboo
• Soy Silk - Yarn/Silk made with soy. 

For now I will work on my needlework and drop far few stitches before I invest in a more pro eco-friendly yarn.

Your friendly neighborhood hippie mom.