Made from Trash: Eco Freako

Here's a little story about the trash-to-treasure (actually repurposed recycling bin junk!) design, Eco Freako.

A few years ago, we carried a Soul Flower Original design called Eco Freako for both men and women. Remember this old gem?

It has been in retirement for awhile now, but we still love the message. So for Summer 2014 we decided to freshen up Eco Freako to make it a little more freako and a lot more eco!

I knew I wanted to make this design really handmade. Not just hand drawn, but pieced together with real, physical objects. Thinking of the message "eco freako," I knew exactly where to begin: my recycling bin!

At my apartment building, we co-mingle our recycling. So I took a look through my big bag of mixed recyclables under the sink and emptied the whole thing out. I picked out some things to repurpose, cut up, and print.

I cut out the letters from a packaging box with scissors.

Rolling out some waterbased printmaking ink, I stamped a wine cork in the ink and made some cork prints.

The trees I cut out of the lid of an oatmeal canister.

Then I stamped through the cutouts with some watered-down ink on a repurposed t-shirt rag.

I rolled the ink brayer on top of bubble wrap, cardboard, onion and orange produce bags, plastic produce bags, and more and stamped each piece down on paper to create a print.

In the end, I had a whole bunch of 'printed' recycled materials!

Next step is to digitize everything. Scan it in and turn it all into one-color graphics so it's easier to piece together into the final design.

A little bit of pixel pushing and the final design is complete! Every part of the design is made from the recycled materials, printed, digitized, and collaged together to be freaky awesome.

Eco Freako for women is available now, printed on a 50% organic cotton, 50% recycled plastic, made in the USA T-shirt. It was featured in the Soul Flower Summer 2014 Lookbook Lost in Ever Everland.

I love making designs this way! It's a fun way to reuse materials, and the final product is always surprising when you learn the process behind it. I love how the message Eco Freako is literally infused into the design.

The best t-shirt is the one with a story, and an eco-friendly story is always best. Reduce, reuse, recycle, and repurpose on!

❤ Leiah
artist at Soul Flower

PS: Emptying out my recycling bin for this project, I realized that my husband and I go through way too many plastic produce bags. I never realized just how many plastic bags we were recycling until I saw them all at once :(

This realization gave me a swift kick in the pants to make a change. I immediately bought a set of reusable produce bags. Now we either put our fruits & veggies in these reusable bags, or pick the big plastic produce bags at the store that are large enough to reuse as liners in our garbage can. We've cut out all those extra small plastic produce bags that were literally going from grocery store, home, and straight into the recycling.

Just a small change in my eco freako quest :)