Stomping Grapes in a Tea With Iris reversible hat

I love this photo of my mom at last weekend's grape stomp at Gainey Vineyard in Santa Ynez, CA.  If you get grapes smeared on your Tea With Iris hat, just flip it over for a fresh new and hip look!

Layer your Happy Power Dress!

Just a friendly reminder that you can layer happy power dresses to keep your children warm.  

Upcycled Sweater Hats

This is the time of year when I turn those disheveled, frumpy sweaters into cheery new fall and winter hats.  I look forward to creating these new upcycled threads!

Blue Sage Organic T-Shirts

New organic t's available in my shop

with hand-painted prints of the sage from our garden. 

MY SHOP!

Upcycled Hair Accessories!

I've been wanting to come up with a product to use all of my upcycled fabric remnants and I'm really loving these classic bows that I've been making.  I'm using different types of hair clips to accommodate all of our different hair types.  I hope you like them.

MY SHOP!

Happy Power x 2

Two beautiful girls in happy power dresses!

Local Waste Management starts Restaurant Composting Program

This makes me happy!


http://palmdesert.patch.com/articles/burrtec-spurs-restaurant-composting

It's raining pods!

Our mesquite tree is dropping its pods so I did a little research to see what to do with them besides sending them off with the garbage man...Here's some great ideas from


Flagstaff’s Community Supported Wild Foraging Newsletter

Tommy Bahama's joins the Tea With Iris Composting Program.

Yesterday I met with Tommy Bahama's restaurant on El Paseo in Palm Desert, California to start composting their kitchen waste as part of my Tea With Iris Composting Program.  It is only a couple of blocks from my house so it is a perfect addition to my composting pickup route.  The managers, chef and kitchen staff were all very receptive and enthusiastic about starting the program.  I dropped off a 5 gallon container with lid to start them out with collecting their vegetable waste.  "We are excited to start this new endeavor with Tea With Iris" said manager Waleska Coffman.

The chef just called me an hour ago to pick up the bucket and requested 2 more 5-gallon buckets.  It's great how easy it was to start out with such a large restaurant; it just proves to me that my small business of one can make a difference in reducing waste locally.


Here is an article from Palm Desert Patch on my composting program.

Waste = Food

It's official...I started the 'tea with iris composting program'.

WHY?

• one of my favorite books, Cradle to Cradle, says it perfectly..."WASTE EQUALS FOOD.  Nature operates according to a system of nutrients and metabolisms in which there is no such thing as waste."

• 1/3 of global food production goes to waste.  I want to change this statistic at the local level.

• my biggest success in growing my own food started with home-grown compost.

I plan to hit restaurants within a 2 mile radius of my house and start collecting their food waste and turning it into nutrient-rich compost. I started this week with Keedy's diner, since we practically grew up at the formica counter relishing their chocolate malts.  It was also my father's first job in high school which makes him sort of a VIP if you can say that in a diner. So they were very receptive to my plan of picking up their food waste.  I'm starting small by taking their coffee grounds, then I'll move on to egg shells; I don't want to disrupt the kitchen's whole cooking process overnight.

This is also an open invitation to my neighbors and friends that live near us to bring their food waste to our compost bins.  Here is a helpful link on what you can and can't compost:

http://www.compost-info-guide.com/beginner_guide.htm