Green weddings
Hippyshopper editor Gabrielle chronicles trying to have a small, affordable wedding while pleasing her dreamed-of-a-fairytale-wedding-since-he-was-a-boy fiance and trying to keep her consumerism low. Invitations are a guaranteed puzzler.
In addition to being cantankerous, non-girly when it comes to weddings, and, shall we put it nicely, value-conscious about my spending on events, I am also not much of a crafty type. Arts yes, crafts, not so much. Nonetheless the idea of making my own wedding invitations was appealing, partly for the strictly practical reason that it meant I could design them to be a more standard letter size and thereby avoid the postage premium attached to non-standard format envelopes. I'm also aware that the closer the wedding gets, the less time there will be to deploy the human touch - we'll be increasingly disposed to shell out for ready-mades.
The first question, of course, was, "John, how many invitations do you think we'll have to send out?"
"Oh, about two hundred," he said, and went back to typing.
"WHAT?"
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Green weddings
When John mentioned the idea of an organic wedding cake, I admit I rolled my eyes. I'm a bit, shall we say, fiscally conservative, to begin with, and never really had the girlish daydreams about a big wedding (certainly far less than he does!) so the first thing I thought was, how much more is this dratted cake going to cost now? I'd seen the cakes in the bakery windows and instinctively guessed that, like the dress, anything that single-use was going to be expensive. Yes. Top Hat Cakes, the first Soil Association approved wedding cake maker, charges £60 for their simplest 30 serving, and it goes up to £800 for their most elaborate 200 serving cake. As I complained about the dress, I could get quite a nice new MacBook Pro for that price. I am sure it is fabulous, life-changing cake. I am not casting aspersions on those of you who feel a wedding is important enough to merit £800 for one cake alone. But I did have to think about it for a while before I came around to believing it was indeed a good idea - not just the cake, but doing all the food with organics.
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Green weddings
Ever since he was a little boy, my intended has dreamed of a proper church wedding. Being a bit of a stoic noncomformist type myself, I've suffered this idea in comparative silence, until one day that we were cruising past a David's Bridal and I hauled him in. "Notice," I said breezily, "polyester dresses starting at $300. Ooh look, this one's nice. $800. Still polyester though." By the time we left, a scant fifteen minutes later, he was whiter than the gowns and paying close attention to my observation that our wedding clothes alone could cost more than two new laptops; that we could have one big party or a modest down payment on a place where we could live for the rest of our domestic lives. That day he gave up the idea of seeing me in glistering princess white - and three days later, the idea sprang back to life.
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Fashion & accessories
Precious metals and stones often have a nasty secret history - but at GreenKarat you can know exactly where it's coming from through their Green Assay. For each piece, the listing contains information on whether the metal is recycled, if the gems and other components are ecologically mined, if the metal is from an ecologically certified refinery and if the jewelry maker used ecologically sound manufacturing procedures. They also recommend you pay the voluntary carbon tax - a premium of about half a percent that covers the carbon. My favourite piece is called First Fig, which features a lab-created emerald in either recycled gold or platinum. At $325 USD and with so many ethical components, it truly qualifies as what they call a Responsible Indulgence. [GT]
GreenKarat
Related stories: Stephen Einhorn's ethical and bespoke jewelry l Ethical Lord of the Rings l Recycled silver jewellery
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