be eco conscience, SHOP cosa verde!

i am very very excited!!  you can now find my eco conscience accessories on the cosa verde site!  i am so flattered to be surrounded by such gorgeous eco talent! THANK YOU cosa verde! see my store here.

it's very important to me that bungaloe be as eco as possible while still being fashionable and reflect the style and designs i like.  i didn't want to sacrifice my aesthetic to fit into the mold of what society thinks an eco-friendly person is, acts or should dress like.  my designs are modern & edgy far - from granola (but there is nothing wrong with that!).  although my parents are hippies at heart my mom always dresses fashionable and my dad always cut his hair.  so it's important to me to stay true to myself.

my parents raised my brother and i to be conscience of the earth, waste, chemicals, eating healthy and so on.  i knew that transfats and preservatives were bad for you almost at birth, my parents found trader joe's like 15 years ago, we composted, recycled, mc donalds was a once in a year thing and lucky charms cereals and the like were a curse word.   so when thinking about starting an accessories line there was no doubt i wanted to try my best to love the earth while making fashion. bungaloe handbags are made from reclaiming leather, my faux leather is eco-friendly, biodegrades and pvc free and my linings are made from organic cotton.

GIVEAWAY FROM BUNGALOE

i think it's about time i host a giveaway, in these stressful economic times it's hard to scrounge up the cash to buy the fun things in life. it's 7am on a wednesday and i wanna spread some joy!
YOU can win this screenprinted bungaloe canvas clutch handmade by me!

featuring 2 snap closures, an outside pocket and houndstooth screenprinted detail, measures approx 11.5" w x 6.5" l, made with organic canvas and waterbased ink.

here's how to win:
1. look thru my blog and note your favorite post in a comment on this post. (you MUST leave a comment because this is where i will choose the random winner from!)
2. take a look thru my etsy store and heart your favorite item.
3. if you have a blog become a follower of my blog.

pretty simple! you have until 12am tuesday march 16th.
i will choose the winner at random by next wednesday 9am and announce it on my blog!!

eco shmeco

i hate that saying 'go eco', 'be green', 'save the earth'. call me a self hating hippie if you want. i'm happy people are being more considerate to the earth because we only get one, but bandwagoners are annoying. what do i mean by that? i don't know, my vocabulary is limited these days. it's not the sayings or that people are now being enlightened so much as what those sayings bring to mind that bothers me: tree-hugging, slow and low speaking, flowery people. yeeeeah duuuuude save the planet. stop it. just stop. do people actually behave that way or do they think that's how an earther is? i made up the word earther. it's another word for hippie.
maybe it's the ny'er in me but i tend to gravitate towards the loud, obnoxious and funny but educated earth lover. maybe that's going too far. i may not want some colossal sized guy junked up on wheat grass jumping on my table to tell me about his vegetable oil run ford van either. i'd push him off the table and laugh.
you might be asking yourself? why? why talk about this? cause this is a double pronged rant.
a) my dad is a hippie and he is a funny, sarcastic, joyous man. thank the stars. maybe not a full fledged off the grid hippie but we did what we could, mostly we tried not to make garbage. we recycled way before it was cool and had a compost heap.

so b) i'm faced with this issue all day when i make stuff. sometimes i look around and wonder am i just making another piece of junk that will end up in the trash? i think i might also start looking into buying old leather garments and ripping them up to make new stuff.

you know reduce, reuse, recycle duuuuuuuuude!

busy busy

sneak peek of the new clutch design i have been working on:

it's zippered and folds over on itself with a snap closure, there is a slip pocket under the fold and two inner pockets.

faux leather and me

in trying to keep with a mostly eco product, and maybe someday all eco i am considering getting some faux leather. using organic canvas is awesome and i would like to keep using that plus some hemp. but adding some faux leather to my designs would be just splendid.
after months of research i have found two spots to get a more eco faux leather. although the best choice would be if they would start making it from plant cellulose. i couldn't find any like that.

turns out polyurethane is a better choice, but i also have found some that is produced in a less harmful way, which is a plus: no voc's and polyurethane breaks down and degrades unlike vinyl and pvc based pleathers. pleather sounds so uncool anyway. so what is the point of this early morning eco diatribe? i can't wait to dig into a new material and see what is possible, so far i have no idea how to sew faux leather, this could get messy.

printing elbow and much more.....

my elbow is killing me. i can only think that it's from a print job i did for a local church here. 200 shirts in one day all by myself, woe is me (it took me a couple tries to spell woe).

in other news, i'd like to share the process in which i make new screenprints. as you know they are mostly if not 100% inspired by my surroundings and in keeping with that here is the story about building houndstooth:
i really love the houndstooth pattern. i have a pair of flip flops from reef that are houndstooth patterened and they rocked, super rocked. but one of them broke......le sigh.
so i created a new pattern, it's houndstooth but the shape for the pattern is made from this picture of the dayton towers building in my town of rockaway:

so from here i used my trusty computer to create a houndstooth design and cut it out from a spot on the picture:

the next step was to take this and turn it into a pattern:

after that i printed it out on transparency film, and used the film to create a screen, which i used to screenprint this design onto my fabric and then i sewed my fingers to the bone to create bags like these:

and that's that!