Green Living

This backyard party is proof that eco-friendly entertaining can be pretty too

published on July 31, 2019 by Angela Hamilton
updated on May 1, 2023

We’ve been sharing sneaks on Insta all summer, but I’m pretty darn excited to announce that our eco-friendly entertaining guide is HERE! I know it’s a little late in the season, but I wanted to compile all the photos of our summer backyard party into a guide that proves just how easy and affordable it can be to throw a beautiful party with the environment in mind.

PS: After you scroll through the photos below, be sure to follow the link to DOWNLOAD the rest of our entertaining guide!

Why is beauty so important here? If you search Google or Pinterest for oh, about five seconds, for an eco friendly party, you will not be surprised. It’s pretty much all along the same style, including lots of outdated trends at this point. In this case, I can totally see why a hostess would cringe at the thought of throwing a party with an “eco” spin. Then there are entertainers on a budget (hi!) who want to throw a pretty party too. There are tons of single use products marketed to these very people, with pretty patterned paper plates (that’s a mouthful) and even those “handy” plastic wine glasses that “look like the real thing” (don’t get me started). Being in the wants-to-create-something-beautiful-on-a-budget camp myself, I don’t believe I should have to resort to single use to host a creatively styled gathering. So, those are just a few thoughts we kept in mind while putting this together. We really did want to speak to people like us, who love Pinterest and Instagram and all the pretty parties they inspire, but wanted to be conscious of both our budget and our impact.

The first thing we did when planning our party was decide the vibe. We knew we wanted it to be casual and in a backyard, so the picnic idea was just SO much easier than finding enough furniture.

Knowing we had a backyard party vibe helped us narrow down food options. I’ve been all over the Mediterranean diet lately, and I liked that a mezze board could be vegetarian friendly (vegan if you take out the feta/tzatziki) and require minimal cleanup.

We used the same concept for our fruit platter. We always add a little jcoco chocolate, which is a local Seattle brand that fights hunger with every purchase.

You can find our wine cocktail idea in the full guide below, and we’ll do a post on it soon too!

You probably know by now that we use edible flowers on just about everything. Instant pretty!

We also talk more about sourcing decor for your party in our guide but some of the key pieces we used were a marble platter from member Ten Thousand Villages, jute place mats and coasters from Will + Atlas (mostly to steady drinks/vases on the grass), and some pretty linens from Etsy.

We thrifted a few pieces, but for the most part, went with what we already had, which helped us define our color palette and style too.

I created a few farmers market floral arrangements using the techniques shared here, opting for a wildflower look that’s very much trendy and in season right now.

We’d love to share the rest of our eco friendly entertaining tips with you! Simply sign up for our email list to receive monthly updates from the eco club team, and you’ll get a welcome email with the instant download of our 9 page PDF guide with more photos + tips.

ECO CLUB SIGN UP + DOWNLOAD GUIDE

Have you thrown a low-waste party this summer? Share your tips below!

*Photos by Charity

Sustainable Home Decor for Every Style: Ethically Sourced Bohemian Decor

published on June 24, 2019 by Angela Hamilton
updated on May 1, 2023

Did you catch our first post in this series of sustainable home decor for every style? First, we covered the artisan home decor trend–you know, the one with playful colors, lots of natural textures, and some minimalist accents. Next up, another favorite of mine is bohemian decor, and I know it can come off as super trendy and not necessarily something that comes off as classic, which could turn any ethical shopper off from buying into. However, if your style leans bohemian season after season, there are definitely ways to get that laidback, free-spirited vibe with pieces that will last longer and turn more heads than your average department store finds.

Ivory tower reversible rug / Jakarta rattan dining chair / Jars of Dust teapot / Mustard woven bowl / Wildwood Candle Co Maple / Gardenia alpaca throw / Wicker fan / Wicker mirror / Ula oil burner / The essential companion tote from Ten Thousand Villages / Pie dish / Samaya meditation cushion

Besides the ninety thousand other arguments for purchase sustainable home decor when outfitting your abode, I’d say that one major reason is that you are bound to curate a look that’s entirely yours. There will always be trend, but finding handcrafted and slow-made goods to personalize your look means committing to finding and investing in objects that truly represent your style. Plus, the more you shop slow-made, the more you start to realize just how much every. single. thing. you find mass produced is influenced by (or straight up stealing from) an original artist, designer, or craftsperson. It’s jarring!

Back to bohemian home decor. I find my personal style being more of a mix of the artisan home, eclectic thrifted goods (so many quirky finds I try to incorporate in an otherwise fairly reserved space!), and a few boho pieces for added flair. I’d love to incorporate a little more of this look, if I could!

Stay tuned for the next in this series, where we talk modern goods for the sustainable home.

Sustainable Home Decor for Every Style: A Timeless Take on the Artisan Home Trend

published on June 17, 2019 by Angela Hamilton
updated on May 1, 2023

“Trend” is kind of a dirty word in green living and ethical shopping circles. It represents something fleeting, which contradicts our desire to buy those things that are important and are made to last, and less of them, instead. As a creative and a lover of design (Pinterest is still my favorite way to peruse the internet), I think I’ll always get at least a little caught up on trends. But not all of them are totally fleeting, and not all of them are totally useless as far as finding things I actually want to keep. Take the “artisan home” trend. I like to think the increase in demand for artisan home decor signifies our society’s evolution to more conscious, sustainable living.

Round textile pouf (Made Trade, sold out) / Silver rug / Pure beeswax candles / Mini copper rake / Small palm basket / Walnut chopping board / First light ceramic vase / Minna pantelho throw / Blush serving dish (Moorea Seal, no longer available) / Woven palm leaf Moses basket / Pom cushion in burnt / Pom cushion in natural white / First light ceramic plate

how to decorate the artisan home sustainably + ethically

My inspiration for this artisan home decor moodboard was to create a sustainable home design that incorporated some really fun, inspiring trends, like rattan and natural woven materials, geometric textiles, and gorgeous minimalist ceramics, while still maintaining a timelessness that one could evolve with. If you love the artisan home decor trend, I think you’ll find a few pieces that seem like home staples, rather than trendy accents. All sources above come from a selection of my favorite ethical and fair trade home decor shops, and most of them share more details about the story behind each product, in their respective descriptions.

I hope that learning the stories behind our product turns from trend to timeless, and we all enjoy more meaningful pieces inside our homes.

How would you describe your home decor style? I’d love to create a moodboard of sustainably sourced ideas for your signature look!

Sustainable floral tips for DIY flower lovers

published on June 6, 2019 by Angela Hamilton

My love of fresh flowers goes back as far as I can remember. Once, my mom told me we’d be going to visit my grandma’s friend, who owned a house with a backyard full of lush gardens. I imagined fields of wildflowers, but found pristine landscaped gardens instead, like something that would line a cottage in England. Both inspire me now. I love the manicured front lawns of my Seattle neighborhood. I love the poppies emerging from the sidewalks. And when I lived in Los Angeles, I loved the bougainvillea along the freeways, the succulent gardens, the pepper trees.

Writing for the wedding industry didn’t curb my floral obsession, but inspired me to learn more about creating arrangements myself, so I could bring these blooms into my own little corner apartment. Working from home can be drab, and I don’t take for granted what the peonies blooming by my side as I write this have done for my mood. Beauty is important.

Flowers can be a frivolous thing, especially when thinking of the environment. Why not leave them be? I understand this argument, but as a crafter, DIYer, lifelong learner, and lover of beauty, there is something really fulfilling to me about creating something new with these small miracles in life. And luckily in my DIY flower adventures, I’ve found, there are many ways to create more sustainable florals.

Sustainable Floral Tips for DIY Flowers

1. Don’t buy fresh cut flowers at the grocery store. Purchase from your local market instead. Most blooms you’ll find at the store are imported. Thinking about the environmental effects of transporting them (and their need for refrigeration) from a top exporter like Colombia alone, is enough to make any eco-friendly DIYer uneasy. Then there’s the question of where they’re coming from, how they are grown (and with what chemicals), and how the growers are compensated (and treated). Perhaps we can dive deeper into this later, but just know that there are many reasons to go local when it comes to fresh flowers and plants.

I created these bouquets during early spring’s daffodil season, so all the daffodils and tulips here came from a market from farms in nearby towns.

2. Supplement with foraged and dried blooms. In Tin Can Studios book Handpicked, Ingrid Carozzi mentions times she would gather greenery or flowers right outside or at the event venue, to round out her arrangements. Often weeds and overgrowth can contribute to more undone, wild-looking arrangements (just make sure you aren’t taking from a delicate habitat that needs them to thrive.)

I love to add a few dried flowers from my personal collection in DIY arrangements. Some dried blooms are ones I’ve dried on my own (like these carnations), and others were purchased at a local farmer’s market. (During the winter here in Seattle, a lot of farms depend on sales of dried rather than fresh flowers, so it’s easy to get.)

Tip: Preserve or purchase a big bunch of dried flowers, then carefully deconstruct the bouquet so you can pull from individual stems when you create a bouquet. For example, eucalyptus is hard to find here, so the time I was able to buy some at the market, I saved a few sprigs. They do get dipped in water since I pair them with fresh flowers, so I trim the stem when I’m ready to save it for a next time.

3. Arrange and rearrange. Some flowers last only a few days in vases, where others (like ranunculus, can you believe it?!) can last up to a few weeks! Whenever I make big arrangements to enjoy at home, I rearrange them every two or three days, picking out anything that can’t be salvaged. Then I rearrange what I have, trim the stems, and replace the water.

I think I used this bunch of baby’s breath in three arrangements before it stopped looking fresh! No need to throw them out when its initial arrangement went… there was plenty of life left.

4. Take care of your cut flowers! It’s important to get to know the kind of blooms in your DIY flowers, so be sure to ask about them when buying at the market. They are the experts! Most flowers live longer if you trim the stems and replace water regularly. Different types of flowers also like different temperates of water, so there’s a lot of details to consider. Learning about the flowers you love, rather than just heading to the grocery store and grabbing a bouquet that will wilt in a couple days, will get you so much closer to truly sustainable florals.

If you’re looking to learn more about sustainable flowers, I recommend the books Handpicked and Foraged Flora.

How do you keep your hobbies as sustainable as possible? Let us know if you try any of these sustainable floral tips for your DIY flowers!

Caring About The Environment is Not a Quirk

published on May 15, 2019 by Angela Hamilton

I mean it is. But it shouldn’t be.

I wasn’t really planning to do any big “welcome to eco club” types of posts like some communities do. Which is why we’ve been live for two months and you didn’t see one. My last blog did more of that and I’m really committing to having less of this “here we are! Learn from us!” attitude and more of a here’s X talking about Y etc.

But if we were to have one, I guess this would be it.

I always feel a slight tinge of embarrassment when I do something like tell the bagger at the grocery store three times (do they get a kickback or something?) in earshot of other customers that, no seriously, I don’t need a bag. Like someone’s there saying, “Angela… Careful now, you’re eco is showing.”

I know I can be pretty self-conscious in general—add it to the list for when I finally do find a therapist—but let’s look at the evidence. As rapidly as our Insta-circles and conscious living communities seem to be growing, as relatively easy was it was for me to hunt down 200+ shops and counting for a guide I’m writing, as trendy as it is for brands to embrace eco—Madewell did just launch a line of semi-affordable sustainable swimwear, after all (which might raise a similar discussion to the one here, I think)—this whole green living thing is still pretty niche. Even the phrase “eco-friendly” is quite cutesy, no?

It’s the same foolishness I described here—it washes over me every time I mention “the environment” to people not immediately in my small circle of advocates. When a friend comes over and asks for paper towels but I point them toward cloth ones; when I go to a different friend’s home and ask them for their compost bin (at least they have them here in Seattle); when I ask if there are “for here” cups for a café’s iced beverages (it appears there is something wrong with putting ice in a mug)—I know that, at best, I seem a little quirky (the nicest possible term for “a bit of a joke”) and at worst, a little privileged, stuck up. But I am privileged. I am privileged enough to live in a society where I can choose not to waste. I can choose the materials I use. I can choose to ask for the things I want. And what am I, if I’m a privileged person who chooses not to make the better choice? I’m something far less cute than quirky, I think. I’m a great big part of a great big problem.

Further, if I’m passionate, motivated, and resourceful enough to share this, I can’t stop there. I can’t blame someone else for how I feel—which is in a way, a lack of confidence in voicing my values, in really, just being me, something that I’m aware is, like, the teeniest version ever of feeling like this part of me isn’t valued in society. I can get over that, truly.

It wasn’t until I was working on another piece, three days before launching our website, that it occurred to me that eco club is kind of my way of owning my quirks. Of taking back this feeling of judgment and saying, give me whatever weird hippie, tree-hugging, granola, snowflake label you want. Stick it all over me. I’ll wear it like a badge of honor. After I upload it to Photoshop and make it way cuter and add some pink.

And you know what I’ll do next? I’ll start a club.

So if you see yourself in any of this (like the guy I described our concept to while co-working last fall who said, “yeah, like you’re standing there thinking, how much longer am I going to spend scraping this jar of peanut butter, what difference is it really making”—especially when there’s actually too much recycling, and hey, isn’t it being diverted to a landfill here in Seattle, anyway?), I’m here to encourage you to lean into it. Maybe one day the quirk will become cool—we can all only hope advocating for a living planet becomes trendy, honestly—and maybe then it will become the norm… there are so many steps to it becoming the norm.

Ultimately, I wanted to create a place where we could not only teach others all the big things we learn on all our different journeys to a more sustainable lifestyle, but also go and talk about all the little quirks that go into it—and have a good laugh about it. Selfishly, I wanted a place to laugh about the time I chased down a flying napkin only to find out it did more harm than good, chat about why any sane 26-year-old would ever start building a tiny house in Montana in the dead of winter, and interview a rad new brand about making sustainable fashion more colorful.

I figured there must be enough of us by now who light up when we hear about hemp finally getting the respect it deserves, or are overcome with rage when we think about palm oil, that we could sit around and talk about it.

Even if you’re not totally there yet, and you’re clicking these links like wait—what?, It’s kinda nice you can do that all in one place, right?

And I mean, if there really aren’t enough yet, and we stay small, that’s okay too. At least now we have a place to go. Welcome to the club.

10 Simple Ways to Go Green as a Solopreneur

published on May 13, 2019 by Natalie
updated on November 2, 2021

One of the main reasons people decide to go full time as a solopreneur is for freedom and flexibility. Choosing when and where to work, traveling as they please, and yoga pants as acceptable work attire. Another wonderful thing about being an independent business owner is the ability we have to make our own business decisions. We can choose to make eco-friendly decisions for our businesses and to even help educate those we work with. To help you begin making more green decisions, we’ve listed out 10 simple ways to go green as a soloprenuer, below! We know everyone’s eco-living journey is unique, so these are just 10 easy options to begin switching your own methods little by little.

Ditch the Coffee Shop and DIY That Latte
No line, no pants, no waste, no problem. Avoid the wasteful cup, lid, and straw by whipping up your own delicious coffee or tea drinks at home. Not only will you skip out on some waste, but you’ll skip out on the bill too! I love to make my own cold brew at home by letting 1 cup of ground coffee and 4 cups of water sit together in the fridge overnight. Just strain the mixture using a fine mesh strainer and sip away!

Pro tip: Use those coffee grounds for a DIY energizing body scrub! Mix the leftover grounds with coconut oil to desired consistency and let the spa day begin.

Opt for Digital Mock-Ups Instead of Printing All the Things
If you’re a creative of any sort, this one’s for you. You’ve probably seen the gush-worthing photos other creatives share of their work printed on pages and all perfectly laid out. These looks are amazing, but they are also easily doable without printing all that unnecessary paper! Instead of printing your works for that one-and-done shoot, make your presentation photos in Photoshop.

Advertise Digitally
It’s 2019! If you aren’t already advertising digitally, get it together! Choose digital advertising methods instead of print ones. Instead of mailing postcards, build that email list. Instead of ads in the paper, put ads on your local news source’s website. It’s great to have a “paper trail” in your biz – unless it’s your advertising.

Source Locally and Choose Eco-Friendly
I know, I know. Some things just have to be printed. When you can support local businesses. When you can’t, choose eco-friendly choices. Because I’m on the move so much, I decided to get my own business cards printed with Moo. They offer business cards made from recycled cotton t-shirts! When working with clients, do some research and try to source locally for them too.

Psst: If you’ve never used Moo, here’s 25% off your first order!

Turn Off or Unplug Your Tech
When you’re done for the day, turn off or unplug your tech. If you’re not comfortable powering it off, just put it in sleep mode. You’ll conserve energy and save some money on that electric bill!

Donate to Eco-Friendly Organizations
Not only is donating to eco-friendly organizations just a pretty darn good thing to do, but it’s also rather marketable. Every time I book a design client, I donate to a non-profit that focuses on reforestation, and they plant 12 trees in areas affected by forest fires. My clients love knowing that their dollars are going somewhere great and that they’re directly helping in some way.

Opt for Green Web Hosting
Often times, web hosting companies will use renewable energy sources or purchase carbon offsets to help even out their energy use. A great example of this is DreamHost. DreamHost houses their servers in a facility which utilizes high-efficiency cooling that uses partially reclaimed water. They are also partner with state-level “clean wind” programs and only use electricity from renewable sources.

Reuse & Recycle
Now, this one doesn’t need much explanation! Reuse whenever possible and recycle as much as you can. Take notes on the back of printed papers you no longer need, reuse that plastic cup from lunch, and use double-sided printing when you can. Check with your local recycling center to see what they accept – you may be surprised! As someone who strives for a zero-waste lifestyle, I use mason jars for all the things. They’re great for storage, that DIY latte you whipped up earlier, overnight oats, or even for a little herb garden!

Revamp Your Workday Snackage
Buying package-free snacks in bulk help you to avoid a lot of excess food packaging that can’t be recycled! Instead of grabbing a bag of chips, stock up on healthy goodies like nuts, berries, seeds, and dried fruits in your local supermarket’s bulk section. This way, you have snacks that last you longer and are just better for you. That bag of convenient chips only takes a few minutes to grub, but the chip bag can take literal centuries to decompose.

Pro tip: If you bring your own containers, you can use tare on the store’s scale for the container’s weight and skip the plastic bag waste. (Hello again, mason jars!)

Digital Gifting
Client gifts are such a lovely way to let your clients know they’re appreciated and to make a memorable mark uniquely. Instead of sending the usual goodie box, opt for digital gifting. Gift boxes are beautiful, but there’s a lot of unknown variables – where were the products sourced from? Were they ethically made? What’s the shipping process? What’s the packaging situation? Personalized emails and thought out gift cards to your clients’ fav places show you care just as much as a mailed gift box would!

BONUS: Educate Yourself and Discover More Ways!
There are so many more ways you can make little green changes in your day to day that are individual to your needs! Take some time to educate yourself and discover those ways. Recyclebank is a fun educational website that teaches you all about recycling and rewards you as you learn. If you’re interested in learning more about the zero-waste lifestyle, check out Going Zero Waste.

Some of these options may take a bit to work into your business! If you’re unsure of where to start, pick one that resonates most with you and begin focusing on it! It all starts with habits. Making new habits is key to working your way to more eco-friendly living! Before you know it, you’ll be running a greener, more sustainable business.

Photo by Charity Hestead Kubena