Bag Lady, Ball Gowns and the Benefit of Hoarding

Ball season is upon us in NZ, with school balls costing parents an arm and a leg.
Katie had her second school ball last weekend, which of course required a different dress to the year before. Last year's dress still hangs in the wardrobe, despite listing it for sale.
I discovered a shop in Albany that hires out new gowns. They are still expensive at around $120 to hire, but generally half the price of a new one, plus they handle the cleaning of them. A much more environmentally friendly option too.
Katie found one that she liked, but it had a bare area over the breastbone - somewhat immodest for a 16 year old. I found a motif that I already had that worked perfectly, hand stitched it on and removed it prior to returning the gown.

Bags, bags, bags - that's what I've been making for the past week or two.
The first lot is to help a fellow zero waster who is running a conference and wants to include reusable produce bags with one topic of the conference covering environmental sustainability in the Early Childhood Education area. She wants 250 bags! So I have been busy with my overlocker and net remnants donated by our local curtain shops.
I've also had requests from people to make produce bags - one was a young mum needing chemical-free material. I whipped her up some made from damaged vintage sheets and a tablecloth from my stash (how can you let those lovely vintage materials go?) and she was delighted with them.

The other set was for a young lady in her early twenties. This young lady works in a supermarket and has got the produce manager to agree to stock reusable produce bags! (I gave her a link to commercial ones, I'm not making those) I find it really exciting that there are so many youngsters coming on board with zero waste.

More Plastic Bag Free Roll-out

Do you love social media? I'm not into all of them, but blogs and Facebook and Messenger I love.
One Facebook group that I follow is Journey to Zero Waste. It has 46,800 worldwide members. How heartening is that?! It's a closed page that you ask to join, and your comments or posts are only shown on that page.

I have met like-minded people via some of these sites, just recently someone from nearby as passionate about reducing plastic in our city as I am. 
She's joining us with our Grower's Market project - we are planning to make enough produce bags for the biggest stallholders to put items in for those people who insist on a plastic bag for items that then go into their reusable bags - go figure! Thanks Pania!

Curtain samples - fortunately most of the remnants were not in this form

Our local curtain shops have been great - donating remnants of nets and sheers for us to sew up. We're going to make the bags big enough to hold a whole cabbage, with no drawstring top.

The Supermarket Project  

We've had two weeks now, spending 2 hours in front of our Regent Countdown supermarket, encouraging people to use reusable bags. After the first 20 minutes we decided to start keeping a tally of who shopped with what, so that we could log progress.
Both weeks were very similar in numbers. Japanese student Kotori came to help us last week, making a beautiful neat tally.

The figures showed:

95 people used plastic bags including 11 people who left with just a single item in a plastic bag.
20 people used reusable bags
2 people had a mix of both
23 people left with no bag - just carrying the items

and we sold 42 bags on the first day and 53 on the second Saturday.

Now that might not seem like a lot of bags, but if they are reused for their estimated lifetime of 100 uses, that's 9,500 plastic bags saved.

We were delighted that the supermarket manager came out to see us as we were finishing up - saying that he's happy for us to continue past our month's trial!