A Great Day for the Planet

Today is a day for celebrating President Obama's BIG WIN and the changes he is going to bring to the world.
I'll be sewing with a smile on my face.
love & peace
Sally
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SO PROUD TO BE CALLED AN ECO HERO

On cloud nine today having picked up a copy of the Saturday Telegraph magazine where my lovely husband Stewart and I feature as this week's ECO HEROES on page 77. It is specially wonderful when you work from home without the usual daily feedback from colleagues who remind you of where you are and what you're aiming to achieve. So today as I sit in my room surrounded by untidy piles of recycled fabric that await transformation into very desirable shopping bags I will be basking in the warm glow of recognition.
Thanks everyone
love & peace
Sally
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Reality check

This photograph was taken last week of the coast near Mumbai (formally Bombay) in India. Looking up and down the coast in both directions this is the way it was. The trees and bushes draped in shreds of plastic bags washed up by high tides and floods and left there to blow in the wind. The reason I find this so shocking is that I was beginning to think about the plastic bag message as something that had got through to people - I was feeling positive.
This is such a horrible sight and there must be so many others like it. Our plastic waste is shipped to the East, their waste is thrown into the rivers, the rivers flow into the seas, the tides carry it around the world. And all that plastic will never go away.
No amount of words can carry the anti-plastic bag message more forcefully than this image.
love & peace
Sally
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MONEY RAISING TEA PARTIES

Last weekend I read an article about African Solutions to African Problems, a charity that goes
right to the people who need the help and gives it to them ASAP - as soon as possible. It is often hard to know whether you are really helping when problems are far away and so many agencies are involved, but this is different. One of the main aims of this organization is to help the grandmothers in South Africa who have survived to care for their Aids-orphaned grandchildren. Please do have a look at their website http://www.africansolutions.org then arrange to have a Tea Party to raise money for Grandmothers United. I am proud to be a Grandma myself and am getting together with friends to hold a Fabulous Tea Party next month. It will be such fun with bunting, table cloths, pretty china cups and saucers, raffles, cup cakes and cucumber sandwiches. So if you are a Grandma please get involved and if not then tell your Gran and offer her your help on the day.
Love & Peace
Sally
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NO MORE BLOGGERS BLOCK

I have been suffering from bloggers block but someone has rattled my cage enough to get me out of it. I have been avidly reading all comments, interviews, opinions and (if only) gossip about Sarah Palin and am convinced she is more dangerous than all the conflicts in the world put together. My heart sinks and right now I'm hoping someone, somewhere will dig up some dirt that will stick because so far she seems to be turning all the negatives into saintly positives. Pardon me - concealing your pregnancy, being so fiercely ambitious that you fly across the continent to deliver a speech while leaking amniotic fluid, then having the baby induced and delivered a month early and returning to work within 3 days - when did these actions become laudable? Now she brandishes her Downs Syndrome infant and pregnant teenage daughter like must-have accessories. I'd imagine that in the US you criticize her at your peril. Well, she's scaring me and if elected she would be one side-step away from what the Americans describe as Leader of the Free World.
Please America - don't put her in a position to make any decisions about our planet.
Well - I've got that off my chest for now and will share some news about my other obsession - the pollution that is plastic! Courtesy of the Saturday Telegraph's Q.I. I can share that only 5% of the six billion tons of plastic manufactured each year is recycled - and even more shockingly most of the plastic that has EVER been made is still around. It is not biodegradable so it doesn't go away it gets buried, blown away or thrown into the sea where there is a soupy island
of it the size of North America floating in the North Pacific. It's too big to comprehend but the
very serious small message we have to take to heart is to make a huge effort to avoid adding to the problem. Small changes make a big difference so carry a bag or a basket everywhere and buy fruit and veg loose and local.

love & peace
Sally
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Money too tight to mention?

Well, let's try not mentioning it so much. I am feeling mildly hysterical about the overload of statistics about the economy that I am digesting at the moment. Yes, times are hard, bread and milk ARE more expensive than they used to be but I wonder if I really need to worry about the lower than expected profits of the Royal Bank of Scotland and all the other world banks? Too much financial information seems to be aimed at inducing financial panic - and its working. I was musing the other day about the credit crunch (the expression has now entered the dictionary) and whether shrinking household budget would mean a return to buying cheap deals rather than making ethical and environmental choices at the supermarket. I am not the only one giving this some thought as I have just read an article in today's Guardian that addresses the issue. It's really worth reading. There has been a fall in the rise ( if you get my drift) of people choosing to buy organic if you look at supermarket sales alone and Wholefoods/Fresh & Wild have discovered that there may not be the demand they were expecting at the luxury end of the organic market - well perhaps Waitrose and M&S already have that covered.
I wonder whether the huge rise in the number of people growing their own vegetables may be having an effect. Here's a nice statistic - the demand for vegetable seeds outstripped the demand for flower seeds this year! We have re-discovered our love of growing food and buying local, getting veg boxes, knitting, swapping, charity shopping and farmers' marketing and there are only so many hours in the day. Maybe that's why the organic shopper numbers are leveling off a bit - perhaps we simply don't have the time to waft about selecting from all that stuff anymore - too much choice is really exhausting.

My tip on how to avoid depression brought on by the credit crunch is to listen to music instead of the news - something uplifting.

love & peace
Sally
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All these cotton bags

In the past year or two this country has been flooded of cotton tote bags and we all think its a good thing - right? Not sure....I'm starting to worry that the cheap cotton tote bag is becoming a bit of an environmental hazard in its own right.
IF the cotton is Organic and Fair Trade then it truly is wonderful that people are using them instead of plastic bags.
Unfortunately a very large proportion of cotton tote bags are not ethically or environmentally produced. Cotton is responsible for major pollution and chemical contamination in the Third World and tote bags are a huge growth industry in India and China. At Carry-a-Bag I receive emails almost every day from the Far East offering to make and ship bags for me at an ridiculously low cost - even with economies of scale the prices are way too low. Perhaps its time to take a closer look at the labels and make sure that the cheap cotton totes we carry tick all the right ethical and environmental boxes.
I heard a report the other day suggesting that we are fooling ourselves about our diminishing carbon footprint. We have outsourced our manufacturing to the Far East and we should therefore be including their escalating carbon emissions in our sums.
That rings true.

love & peace
Sally
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