Rethinking thanks.

I wanted to tell you all about my green thank-you "notes"!
As you may know, instead of writing everyone a letter, I am either calling people or sending personal video-thank-yous. My experience has been that people are quite surprised to hear from me at first, but then they appreciate what I'm doing and it gives me the opportunity to really express how much I like their gift.

Please comment and share your ideas on alternative thank-you notes!

Hospitality:

I am SO thankful to have such a big family!
They gave me JUST ANOTHER opportunity to be creative!
We had the majority of my family stay at the Carolina Inn for the weekend. We (of course) wanted to have hospitality bags for them when we checked in! That made us think: we don't want to waste plastic or anything, but if we buy those reusable bags, we still have to have them shipped...
It took us a while but we finally came up with an idea: we can use old cereal boxes to put the snacks in!
Here is a "before and after" shot:

Publicity:

I just wanted to say that if you have the chance, pick up a copy of this week's Carrboro Citizen. They intervewed me over the phone and put my picture on the front page! You can view the story online: http://www.carrborocitizen.com/main/2009/12/17/crafting-new-green-traditions/

And you may have heard me live on WCHL this past Thursday around 7:40 AM. I had about a 90 second interview and then I've heard that they used clips of it and turned it into a real news story!

(P.S. I was also interviewed for the Independent and I am pretty sure that it is coming out sometime in late December!)

Time to Relax!

Hey everyone!
Just wanted to say that my bat mitzvah weekend is over. It was TONS of fun and I am SO grateful to all of those who helped out!
But don't worry; I am keeping the blog going because we all know that there is ALWAYS more that we can do.

Pass it on:

Hey everyone:
thanks so much to all of you for commenting and all the encouraging feedback!
Great idea about reusing the centerpieces! People could add to and improve them as they get passed around. After this weekend, email me your date and we will work it all out!: Sadie.B.Rapp@gmail.com
4 more days!

Thanks but No Thanks:

For the rest of the week*, I want you to think green and share your ideas about INVITATIONS and THANK YOU NOTES. Do you think there are greener ways to do them? Do some go overboard with paper, or maybe you don't see why invitations and thank you notes could be wasteful. Let's see if we can think of more eco friendly ways to do this.



*The week ends on Shabbat, but please still post after that!

Flowers:

For our centerpieces on the tables, we made flowers out of soda cans, bottle caps, and bottle tabs. Not only were we using trash that would've ended up in a landfill, but we also avoided the negative impact that shipping cut flowers(that only last a day or so) have on our planet. Maybe someone will reuse these "bouquets" for another event...

More silkscreening

I have more photos of the silkscreening:

List of Honors:

For the service, in each player book there is usually a piece of paper that says who in the b'nei mitzvah's family is dong what prayer or honor.
I REALLY didn't want to waste all those sheets of paper, so we decided on something MUCH more resourceful:
We cut cereal boxes into strips and silk-screened the honors onto that! My dad got a video of me making some:

Instead of buying new kippot, we reused some from other family events. We made a linoleum stamp for my bat mitzvah and stamped them with Speedball ink. We collected the old ones from various friends and family and in this way we are remembering the past while celebrating today. We had one from my uncle Paul's bar mitzvah in 1956!

Placecards:

For my Bat Mitzvah party, we have made placecards out of old cardboard boxes so that we don't waste paper. We used unpressed bottle caps to write the table numbers in.