Happy Earth Day

Happy Earth Day Everyone... even though really every day should be Earth Day!  As you know my way of making a living and paying the bills is finding new homes for vintage cast offs as well as giving new life to tired and neglected fabric one hand bag at a time.

Recycling and re purposing is not only trendy right now, but it helps the earth and all of us in the long run. Shopping second hand gives you individuality, anyone can go into any box store and purchase what ever it is that they are looking for as well as the next thousand people that walk into the box store across the country.  Walking into a second hand store to me is like being handed a treasure map and  being challenged to find something unique.

Shopping second hand all started when my group of  high school friends were very much into going over to the local Goodwill and finding ridiculous t-shirts from the 70’s and t-shirts that had ridiculous sayings on them.  That was the thing to do when we were bored, now pay attention I grew up in a small town in Wisconsin, this is what we did when we weren’t cow tipping (just kidding, we rarely did things like that).   Any who back to the task at hand, on one of our Goodwill adventures I broke off from the group and went in search of things other then t-shirts and I found this super awesome vintage US Navy issued peacoat (as in from a  real Sailor named Kent his name is written in permanent marker inside) and this peacoat was $5 I was sold.  It was July but I made my purchase, brought it home and bust it out every January as it's the warmest coat I own.

From that peacoat purchase brought a whole new fascination with second hand stores. While my friends were looking for t-shirts I would roam around and find some super awesome stuff which at that time I did not have a use for.  Fast forward 10 years later and I now can be found at various thrift stores, estate sales and garage sales (when in season in the Midwest) on a weekly basis.  I like that I can find unique items that someone else has cast off but still has some life in it for me and more then likely I will be the only one wearing said item.  

 

I hope that  each of you that reads this blog will do something today that is good for the earth, go to your local second hand store and see what you can find.  I will be spending the rest of the afternoon turning a pile of fabric into one of a kind handbags, you know just trying to save the earth one upcyled handbag at a time.

Over-N-Out