Green Cotton

Food, fashion and fun were all on the agenda at last week’s Boston GreenFest, held from August 19-21. Featuring eco-minded exhibitors from all over New England, the family-friendly event took over Boston’s City Hall Plaza. Organic food vendors, green design companies, and plenty of local businesses were on hand to both showcase their wares and generate eco-awareness.

The event kicked off on Thursday morning with a green business breakfast and green jobs forum (featuring former Governor Michael Dukakis). Other highlights included 50/50 raffle (wherein the winner received half the winnings while the other half went to the Foundation for a Green Future, Inc.) and continuous performances held on the City Hall Plaza’s main stage. The concerts, dance performances, stunt work, fashion shows, yoga and workout bootcamp dominated the stage all weekend long. Thursday also featured the One Gallon Challenge, a “race” to see how far the latest fuel-efficient, eco-friendly cars could travel with one gallon of gas… from 110 miles away in Northampton, MA.

Friday’s highlights included the Eco-Runway, featuring Nancy’s Gone Green! Eco Boutique of Framingham, MA. Festival goers could also enjoy another night of performances and shop in the Eco Bazaar. They could also sample organic “world cuisine” in the Eco Cafe, including North Indian dishes from Mela Restaurant, Korean cuisine from Choi Food, Mexican treats from Cha-Cha-Cha, and coffee from Dean’s Bean, a fair-trade, organic company and a Green Cotton favorite! Saturday saw still more exhibitors, concerts and another staging of the Eco-Runway.

New Englanders are fortunate to be able to enjoy large green festivals like this, and the Boston GreenFest is sandwiched between two other major eco-conscious events: April’s Down2Earth and October’s Boston Vegetarian Food Festival. Plenty of healthy, organic food, along with fashion designers and green companies, will descend on VegFest next month, so if you missed GreenFest, be sure to check it out!

Green Cotton was happy to receive a gift from a local eco-friendly vendor that will be reviewed (and raved over!) here on this blog… stay tuned later this week to find out what it is!

Images from: http://www.bostongreenfest.org/index1.html

http://www.bostongreenfest.org/onegalchal.html

http://www.bostongreenfest.org/fashiontent.html

“Proud Mary” was born in 2006 in the heads of two young women who met in Brooklyn as a vision of fair trade, chic fashin. Molly was trying to find a way to utilize her liberal arts education and Harper wanted to see her fair trade and fashion ideas come to fruition.

The women soon found a way to reach both these goals by working alongside different artisan cooperatives on a trip to  Guatemala. The goods produced are designed as a collaboration between the two Brooklynites and artisans in Guatemala. This has resulted in products that are both modern, eco-chic, and high quality with just enough touches of traditional weaving patterns to make them feel truly Guatemalan, an aesthetic Proud Mary refers to as “Ethnic Modern.”

Proud Mary sells three product lines called “Diamante,” “Raya,” and “El Sol.” Through all their partnerships, Proud Mary ensures workers receive double the average compensation for consistent work, and have been able to connect a number of artisans to the micro-finance loan group, Nest.

Diamente is an artisan group based in Guatemala City who are known as the most accomplished foot loom weavers, and who have pioneered many types of brocade weaving.

This wonderful tote with gold straps in the “Diamante” style uses traditional Latin American designs.  Woven on a foot-loom. Available at Proud Mary.

Raya are a group of Cakchiquel-speaking Mayans living in the San Antonio Palopo region of Guatemala. They use traditional weaving techniques over a thousand years old to create belts, hair bands, and friendship bracelets on narrow looms called “telar de palitos,” as well as backstrap looms.

El Sol uses ikat fabric crafted by a master weaver from Totonicapan. This process involves a special dying technique, and then placing the fabric in the warp of a loom to produce unique patterns and images.

This pillow illustrates the design used for all products in the “El Sol” collection, a pattern created as a mistake originally but which has become highly demanded.  Find this and more from the El Sol collection on Proud Mary’s website.

Green Cotton applauds the goals and accomplishments of Proud Mary and we hope to see even more in the future. Check out their collections on their website.

Photosource: http://images.google.com

Cameron Diaz has kept herself busy this month trailing along a train of interviewers from various amazingly fashionable magazines to get the word out on the environment. While the interview we recently reviewed in VOGUE focused mostly on the eco-fashions Diaz wore in her editorial shots, and only quickly mentioned her environmental campaign, Marie Claire dove into her work and gave us a better idea of what exactly Diaz is up to.

Diaz is currently traveling across the country with a small entourage of about twenty cameramen and other crew with a goal of seeing how much the general American person knows about the troubles of our environment in order to raise general awareness.

Unveiling Diaz’s inspiration to talk about the environment, she shares her experience as a child living in a neighborhood in Long Beach, CA, that was not only near a large freeway, but also toxic waste refinery, which would dump waste at the end of her block. “Childhood” also meant suffering from asthma, and an ongoing burning, itchy sensation in her eyes and throat. Coming from this personal experience of knowing what it would be like everywhere if we don’t start treating the environment with more respect, Cameron Diaz speaks with an authenticity that deepens her California starlet persona.

So she has been traveling all over the United States to ask the average American math teacher, high-school girls, and soccer moms questions like, “Do you know where your food, your water come from? Do you worry about the environment?” And always wraps up with the same questions, “What would it take for you to do something about the environment?”

To which most people are very touched, but do not know how to respond. Diaz has met with a general feeling of hopelessness. People do care but do not seem to think anything they can do personally will help the environment as a whole. They feel any changes they make would not stop global warming or deforestation.

While no one person can do any one of these things alone, if we all ban together and do everything we can to save the environment, this will make a huge difference. We can all add up!

So what made Diaz finally campaign after years of silence in this area? She realized that the planet did not have a publicist to speak for her. Diaz decided to use her well-known clout and popularity to promote support for the environment. Just starting the discussion is enough to get people thinking about their actions and the repercussions of their actions.

This new environmental role she has decided to take on can only make us love her more. You go Cameron! The environment needs as many publicists as it can get.

Photosource: Marieclaire.com

Find out about Cameron Diaz’s favorite sustainability websites here.

By: Julia Rea