Green Options Turns One: The Past, Present, and Future of Green Crafts

I can’t believe it has only been one year. My first post for Green Options went live on February 15th, 2007 – just days after the blog launched. It feels like much more than a year that I have been working with these great, eco-minded folks – how the time flies.

Just a year ago, my main focus was covering the fashion beat for the site. Once a week, I’d write about a green fashion brand that was sustainable, stylish and affordable. I also had the pleasure of interviewing some very cool folks, including Jonah Sachs of Free Range Studios (the folks who did The Meatrix), Josh Dorfman (The Lazy Environmentalist), Belinda David-Tooze of Envirosax, and Danny Seo.

After just a few months, Green Options editor and my savvy boss Jeff McIntire-Strasburg gave me the opportunity to start doing reviews as well – including yoga mats, jewelry, TV shows and magazines. We decided together to start writing about more DIY and crafty fashion topics in August of 2007 and have never looked back. I still do a review for each issue of Body+Soul Magazine over at sustainablog (see my take on the Jan/Feb 2008 issue here), but when Jeff told me about Green Options changing from a single blog to a collection of blogs, the conversation about a fashion and crafty blog came to life.

Choosing between heading up the fashion blog or the crafty blog was a tough choice – in the beginning, I was planning to do both. Still, one had to go up first and in my heart of hearts, DIY won. Since the launch of Crafting a Green World in November 2007, I’m consistently taken aback by the great comments and questions our visitors post. Here is a secret: I was iffy about the CAGW name at first, but once David, Green Options’ founder, bought the URL, I wasn’t going to think about changing it. Now, the name in a thing of beauty to me – just as individual and diverse as our readers.

My knowledge of crafty life has only just begun. My family is naturally crafty (crochet, cooking, painting, sewing, knitting, quilting … etc.), but living so far away from them (my mom in Connecticut, my grandmother and sister in Indiana, while I’m in San Francisco – soon to be Portland) my interest in the topic waned during my early adult years.

The past two years have brought back my DIY desires with a vengeance and, thanks to CAGW and Green Options, I’ll be pushing myself even further in the next year to learn and do more creative things to share with our readers. I soon plan on taking a class on how to knit socks and I’m only a few supplies away from making a unique purse (both of which I will be sharing with you all). What else does my next year as Green Options’ crafty expert have to hold? Who knows!

HAPPY BIRTHDAY GREEN OPTIONS

[Image courtesy of flickr.com user hfb]