the fight against food waste

Last week saw the launch of Enough Food #IF.
One of the aspects that there is not enough food in this world (or let's say fairly distributed, there is more than enough food in this world!) is food waste.
Tristram Stuart does an amazing job in breaking it down and explaining it in this video. Some of these numbers will shock and surprise you, be warned it's a sad reality we live in!

It is way too easy to throw out food, to use everything means you need to plan and get creative. I get a box of organic veggies every single week and as the produce is seasonal I had to come up with seven different ways to cook cabbage recently :)
As with everything in our world, if we all play our parts we can make a change.
You can still sign up and be part of the Enough Food for everyone IF campaign here.
Happy weekend x

American Apparel textile repurposing

I've always loved American Apparel and their philosophy.
This is taking it one step further and I couldn't be more excited about it as it brings together fashion and sustainability!

It is just as exciting as when Nudie made this video explaining their recycled pair of jeans :)
World changers!

a year without buying clothes

If anyone remembers, a year ago I started out my year by making

"to not buy clothing - everything needs to be handmade or if necessary thrifted"

one of my new years resolutions. 

Surprisingly it went really well. For eleven months all I bought was four items of underwear and nothing else, than the weather got freezing over here in the UK and I caved and bought three heat tech pairs of leggings, a jumper, a skirt and a long sleeved shirt. 

But even buying these few items was hard. The amount of times I went into shops, picked something out and put it back again because I decided that I really didn't need it or that it wasn't perfect enough! 

Still, new clothes still found other ways into my wardrobe. My friend Lisa gave me one of her dresses when she cleared out her closet and made me a wooly hat for my birthday. My friend Ruth gave me a stripy top she didn't like on herself, but fit me perfectly and my friend Zoe payed me in garments when I helped out and made accessories for her. Winning!

In addition to that I made a pair of shorts, a skirt and a top that can also be worn as a skirt. All fabric used was already in my fabric boxes and shorts and top were made with naturally dyed and printed cotton fabric. In the summer I decided that the shorts will fit my mum way better and gave them to her. It's all a big cycle and I wish we could have a clothes swap again. It is one of the easiest things to do and everyone ends up leaving happy with new and fun things to fill their wardrobe. When my friend Birgit came to visit after the summer, I let her go through my stash of clothes put aside for the next swap. 

Clothes fill up landfills as we go through them so quickly now that fashion is changing every other month. At some point you realise that you can live with a lot less, get pretty creative and actually use what fills your wardrobe rather than forgetting half of the items you keep in there. 

I'm planning on sticking to everything I've learnt last year. Should the necessity to buy something come up, there will be questions:

• Do I really need it - as in really, really. you'd be surprised how many times you'll put it back
• Do I like it and does it fit me - cut, fabric, colours, etc
• What can I wear it with - can I layer it and make it work in different seasons
• How well is it made - this kills it most of the time as I usually inspect seems, buttons, etc

Going into overcrowded shops and being pushed around by the crowds on busy shopping streets or malls, to be honest I haven't missed a thing. The only time I was really bummed out to be missing is when Marc Jacobs had 70% off haha

Here's to a creative 2013 and creating less waste!

new years resolutions

Contrary to popular believe I have not given up on this space here.
Just needed some time off and three days in the countryside gave me new energy to start writing again.
Too much has been on my mind lately but I'll start off with resolutions for this year :)
Here goes...

• 2013 is a year of skirts and dresses
• shop local and buy seasonal
• learn to can food - pickles, jams, relishes, etc
• write letters and cards
• take more photos and get way better at it
• take more time out to spend in the word of God
• refuse, reduce, recycle
• be daring (this is a weird one but to me it means a lot!)

I'll elaborate on all of them in another post but these are the goals I want to tackle this year and I'm quite excited about. As many will notice there is a theme of sustainability running through this once again. 

Hope everyone's years has started with a bang and is off to become one of the best. 

Happy weekend everyone x

favourite Bs on their allotment

Don't let these pictures fool you, this all happened in late September. Just getting around to posting them now :)
I took my bike out for one last ride over to see some of my favourite people before leaving the country once again.
After a lovely afternoon together, we all went to their allotment for one last harvest. For a quick look on what it looked like in July, click here. Can't believe how much they got out of that little patch all summer. Nature is pretty cool.

 

 

 

 

The taste of these veggies is beyond comparison. Nothing store bought will ever taste like it. The baby tomatoes are like eating candy off a vine. Seriously. Plus you have fun playing in the dirt and harvesting food and somehow you feel more at peace there than wandering around the city, ha.
Look at these sunflowers!!! It was a fight to get the heads down haha 3 heads were laid out on my parents balcony and the birds were feasting on the seeds for a couple weeks :) 

beeswax/almond oil hand balm diy

Every time I come to England during the colder months, my hands and fingers start looking like I went over them with a cheese grater! Maybe it's the humidity or the water quality, actually I have no idea but the point is that it's not a pretty sight and it hurts!
Going with the idea of not creating more waste, I was thinking about options other than buying hand cream. Mostly because it comes in plastic packaging 90% of the time and so far I haven't found one that would be effective in these conditions around here.
I remembered coming across this post by 3191 and looked it up, saw that it was ridiculously easy and set out to gather the ingredients. Two that is!
Tracking down beeswax in a city proved to be a bit of a  challenge(or I can't google like other people?!) but I found the cutest shop in Clapham and I'm sure I'll be back. Almond oil on the other hand should be available in most shops. I never got essential oils to perfume it as I loved the beeswax and almond smell. Maybe I'll add lemon next time :)

Basically you take

• 1 part beeswax to 
• 4 parts of a carrier oil, I used almond oil

Heat up and melt beeswax in one jar, warm up oil in another and combine. Stir and let it cool down.
There are no tricks, it's as simple as that.
The jar I used turned out to be gigantic for the amount I made haha
It's not the cheapest thing to do but to be honest I paid about a tenner for 6oz of the finished balm and you get a Burt's Bees 2oz tin for the same price. In your face world, not going back to store bought creams!

a scrap fabric diy continued

Last week I made a bag out of recycled fabric, you can look at it here.
Never showed you the finished result though, so here it is :)

a scrap fabric diy

There is way too much waste in this world (fashion industry one of its biggest contributors!) and I have stacks of scrap fabric that I really wanted to turn into something. So I decided to make some yarn with it.

Step One
Rip fabric into 1cm wide ribbons

Step Two
Knot all pieces together and roll it up

Step Three
Do whatever you like with it...

• knit
• crochet
• weave
• braid 

the sky is the limit :)
In my case I started crocheting and as I'm a sucker for hand stitching I turned it into a tiny bag (and lined it with more scrap fabric! ha).

It's not quite finished yet, still need to figure out if I want a strap or leave it like a clutch and I really need to find a nice button to fasten it, but I like it already.
Happy crafting everyone.

blueberry picking

 

Ruth is the queen of getting this bunch of besties together and to end the era of EheG she got us all together to go blueberry picking and make jam.
It was a ridiculously hot day and we ventured out to the blueberry field (isn't the scenery amazing). The lady working the booth almost crushed our hopes when she told us that there is nothing left but we can go and get some raspberries haha. We went to the blueberry bushes anyway and took whatever we could find, which turned out to be 2.5kg before heading to the raspberries and filling another bucket. Just in case we didn't find any we had reserved another 2kg from the blueberry lady. The berries she pulled out of the fridge were the best treat we had after the scorching sun beat down on us!
I had to go back to work but the girls were busy bees in the kitchen and made delicious jam. Voila.

early harvest

My friends the Bs have a patch in a community field, where they grow veg and pretty flowers. (Seriously it is too easy to plant things and do a bit for our environment by growing your own!)
After our afternoon hangout two weeks ago, Claudia and I went to water the plants, free it off some weeds, thin out some tomato plants and harvest some goodies.

 zucchini

 pumpkin

 chard

 Claudia's bike with harvest goodies

my beautiful friend! Time spent with her is always precious :)

I ended up making a chard strudel with the things she gave me... it was delicious! 

balcony goodness

Since I don't have a garden or access to a garden, I planted tomatoes on the balcony. They used to be beautiful little things, like the photo above, but all of a sudden they look like this:

A storm tried to take them down and basically snapped one of the plants off, but nothing can hinder these guys.

Looks like the harvest might be plentiful :)

bike rides to refresh the soul

Who knew that cycling from the city to my parents house would be so pretty...
Hard to think that it takes just over an hour, which makes taking the train only 20 mins faster. Crazy right.
Here's what I love about riding your bike: it clears your head, you save money and the planet, you actually acknowledge your surroundings and if that weren't enough, you get fit.
And one last bit of information, when cycling uphill and you think that you can't do it cause your legs will give in, belt out Survivor by Destiny's Child. People may look perplexed but it helps :)

a day of strawberries - the canning part

rhubarb and strawberries bubbling away

I don't know how I got to this age without ever having made jam?! A mystery and it is so darn easy as well!
Anyway one of my new years resolutions was to learn how to preserve food, so I finally got to tick that box, yay. It shall be the beginning of a hopefully long journey (learning curve) of preserving and canning.
By the way, it turned out yummy :)

way to go fashion industry

Excitement is running high right now... I just read this article by Tamsin Blanchard about eco fashion from high end labels all the way to the high street and how Marks & Spencer, H&M, Topshop and others are putting a lot of effort into going green. Horray!!!
Go and read the article on the online Telegraph. Happy weekend everyone x

teeny tiny steps to change the world

change noun

def. to make the form, nature, content, future course, etc., of(something) different from what it is or from what it would be if left alone


I first got into this whole environmental/green business during primary school. No kidding, it's true! It's where we learned to recycle and creating less waste and most of all we had a very exciting project about composting when I was in 4th grade :) For a while, even parents set out to create as little rubbish as possible, taking containers to the grocery store instead of using wrappers, etc. 
Anyway, going green in Austria is honestly not that big of a deal as most people are quite conscious about recycling, low energy use, bringing your bags to the shops and all of that. It's just a normal part of life. 
In 2007 Rob Bell and his church started a series called "God is green" and for the first time ever I heard about these things in a church environment. How did the church miss out on such a massive topic until recently??? Later that year, while on tour in Stockholm, I bought a book called "Green Is The New Black" and for the first time I read about how messed up the fashion industry is, when it comes to sustainability and waste. A bit ironic since I went to fashion school and I can't remember a single lecture even mentioning the environmental impact this industry has! Ever since, I've been reading more and more about it and been overly critical of where my clothes come from or what they are made of, if I buy at all haha A lot of my wardrobe has been swapped or passed on from someone by now.
A year later I read "Serve God, Safe The Planet" by Matthew Sleeth and it brought on another layer of how I view the world and why it is so important to steward this earth well.
Probably the biggest impact so far was reading Colin Beavan's book "No Impact Man" in 2010, it changed how I live my life. 
Things like using less water (I still suck at taking shorter showers), turning off lights, lowering the thermostat on my heating by a few degrees, riding my bike, walking up the stairs instead of taking lifts, etc. I even tried my luck at growing my own veg, which worked in London for some reason but not in Salzburg - it's all trial and error haha. Anyway looking back, quite a bit changed since then.
There are still a lot of days when I forget to bring a bag to the shops and I end up carrying groceries in my bag, praying that nothing will leak over my camera and books or phone haha At least I'm trying, right.
The most recent thing I've dabbled into is to create less plastic waste. After watching Plastic Planet, I was disgusted with how much plastic we use and how no-one actually knows what is in it or how unhealthy it really is. As a direct result of watching this film, I bought a water bottle and it's travelled with me for 8 months now, yay!
One of the areas that creates too much plastic waste is the bathroom. One by one I let pretty much all products run out and substituted them with alternatives. My toothpaste comes in recyclable packaging now, I went back to bar soaps and the biggest difference probably is that I went shampoo free almost 4 weeks ago.  I switched to a baking soda/water mix to wash my hair and I rinse it with a vinegar/water mix which I keep in two glass bottles. So random!!
A strange move if you ask me and after reading up on it I was sceptical at first, but my hair feels cleaner and softer than ever before. Also travelling has become very light these days which is always a bonus if you ask me!


It takes 40 days to create a habit. Some things you have to think through and ponder for a while before you do it, others you change in a day. It's all about teeny tiny steps to change the world. Don't underestimate how much you can accomplish by starting to change one tiny aspect.

packing once again

I'm heading to the wonderful city of Salzburg...  Hooray!!
Going with my sustainable lifestyle, I'll be riding my bike to the train station and take it with me on the train, just to jump out in Salzburg and ride to my Salzburg family's place, where I'll be camped out at for the next two weeks :) It will be interesting since I've got a massive backpack and hand luggage haha Somehow I wish I could document it :)
Anyway I'm so happy to be going back to work again. I'm sure I've talked about seasons before, there is a time for everything yada yada yada... This last season in between jobs has been a tough one for me. It's weird being in a place I once called home but doesn't feel like that anymore.
Being in a place you really hoped to be familiar with or feel comfortable in plus being out of work is a really strange combination. Way too much time to let your thoughts run loose.
It would be so easy to let go of God's promises in times like these when everything is just one gigantic question mark. Again I'm thankful for amazing friends who speak into my life and who encourage me and tell me off at times. There have been many conversations that have cleared my head and encounters with strangers that brought new perspective.
We all have a very unique race to run in this lifetime but can I tell you something... sometimes my race feels darn lonely compared to those around me.
Does it mean the nomad days are over - hell no (caged bird syndrome sets in way too early haha)
Does it mean that I've got to get out of Austria again - probably yes (it just doesn't feel right)
Does it mean that I gotta trust God with my whole life and believe that He has the ultimate plan for me - YES, YES and YES. To be honest, I've been really bad at this and let obstacles and difficulties distract me like nothing else. I gotta hold on to the things that have been spoken over my life and have faith that there is a way bigger part to this than I can ever believe or hope for.
Looking forward to two weeks in the theatre. It will be crazy and schedules are far from normal, but I can't wait to be back there.
Have a phenomenal start of the week everyone. Thank God for new mercies every morning x