Thread: Eco friendly costuming?

Is this something that anyone has ever looked into or cared about?

I ask because i'm becoming more and more in love with sewing and hand crafting and I've started to make my own costume pieces that i'm actually *gasp* proud of.

And this weekend, I'm giving a presentation at the garden I work at on natural plant based dyes. In doing the prep work (and dyeing the examples) I've discovered that OH MY GOD MAKING DYE IS THE MOST FUN THING EVER... especially when i started mixing in acids/bases and the dyes started turning colors. (oh by the way, I'm a HUGE nerd)

So I was thinking at first that hand made, hand dyed, ecologically friendly hair falls would be cool to make. But now I'm thinking wait! Why can't I make my costumes this way too? The colors are muted (well some, beet dye is bright orange) but I'm wondering if that might work for some venues.

And then I was wondering if anyone else knew of some sustainable/eco friendly costume vendors.

im not a vendor, and im not sure this really counts, but im a costume refurbisher. 99% of my costume making supplies come from other costumes - ugly ones or old ones people can no longer use.

not costumes (yet -- hahaa!), but jewelry-wise, i've often doodled with, like aasiyah, bits from uglier/broken ones. and also used a lot of "found" stuff, generally from nature, cos i love that. feathers, shells, stones...

I am a HUGE Vintage costume collector. And yes, I do wear them! Some I update, some I wear as is.

I would love to find out more about plant based dyes. I have been thinking about starting to dye veils and 3 panel skirts in a small way. This could be fun.

{{{HUGS}}}

Recycling existing materials is generally (if not always) more eco-friendly than making new ones, even if the new supplies are organic/low emission. I think it's a really interesting idea though - and if I were in the market for a costume (I'm not), I'd be very interested in "new" costumes made from repurposed/recycled parts of old costumes.

I suspect that this is a whole lot more complicated - is it ecologically more responsible to buy commercially dyed things, or to dye them myself and then pour chemicals in the sewer? Does plant-based or commercial dyeing require more resources? There was an article on Dharma Trading on that tradeoff. Is it better to buy from Egypt or the US or, say, China? What is the eco balance between silk and polyester veils? There are so many factors to the problem that probably the only simple answer is to reuse things. But then, some old things travel to us from half around the world (like my antique cholis) - is that really all that good? (Just today I thought about how not-so-green it is to travel to workshops out of town, too.) It *is* hard to do the right thing.

When I was in Cebu last fall for work (I'm a jewelry designer, and we do a lot of eco-friendly jewelry, a lot of which is made in the Philippines, Bali, etc out of sustainable natural and recycled materials), one of our "manufacturers" (it's really a village-style artisan village), found out I'm a bellydancer near the end of our stay, and her eyes lit up at the thought of us putting together an eco-friendly bedlah. I have some ideas ;)

I think the idea of repurposing costumes and other good will finds is always a better idea... but I know sometimes that is just not feesable.