Eco Friendly Art Supplies
Table of Contents
Introduction
For anyone who loves crafting and/or sewing, it can be a bit daunting to try and sift through all the information to work out what materials are actually eco-friendly or not. The following is mostly copy/pasted from a reply about finding/identifying vegan crafting supplies, with some formatting changes.
Crafting Supplies
Cruelty-Free Supplies
Vegomm offers "The Ultimate List of Vegan Art and Craft Supplies" and Double Check Vegan has "List Of Vegan Art Supplies", but seems to focus mostly on paints, glues, canvas, and paint brushes.
Vegan Womble has listings for craft materials and seem to include links or at least names of companies who supply them.
Pollution-Fighting Supplies
Crayons
Crazy Crayons: Recycled Sticks This company offers crayons shaped like flowers, dinosaurs, stars, and other fun shapes. They have a national crayon recycling program, and you can find small buisnesses on their map which sell their crayons.
Paint
As people become more concerned about remediating pollution, some are getting extremely creative. This video demonstrates "How To Make Paint From Pollution" which shows pollution from an abandoned mine being used to create rich paint colors.
6:26 minute video about turning mine waste into paint.
The paint is sold by Gamblin Colors. You can click here to see their map of partners to learn which shops near you sell their reclaimed colors.
Don't forget that many art supplies used to come from nature, with cultures learning clever ways to use common foods, flowers, rocks, etc. to create beautiful colors for clothing, pottery, and more.
Sewing: Textiles & Notions
HEALable is a super useful resource as it helps you learn which materials are derived from animals, plastics, or more eco-friendly sources. As a crafter/sewer I tend to go for organic cotton if possible, but with thread your choices are usually regular cotton or polyester. I try to avoid polyester as it sheds microplastic into waterways and the ocean via our laundry machines. Patterns are usually just paper, you might be able to find recycled paper or soy-based inks, but I've not bought any since before going vegan, so I haven't looked into this.
This article specifically talks about sewing for vegans and warns that buttons often contain animal products including bone, shellac, etc. So it's a good idea to look for glass, wood, bamboo, or other non-animal alternatives.
I'm a big fan of buying used items from vintage places, and have a ton of mystery buttons but I also cut off buttons from clothes I can't repair or donate, so that I always have a stash of matching sets if I have to button or rebutton a shirt or something. Similarly (an not all vegans will agree here) I'm fine with buying old, used pieces of clothing with made of silk or silk linings, since the fabric is soft and breathes really well. My feeling on this is that most people can't tell silk from other fibers (so it doesn't feel like people will get envious and go buy some new silk) and it helps keep those items out of landfills, vs polyester clothes which I worry will shed massive amounts of microplastics if they are washed for many years.
There are supposedly "vegan silks" where the silkworms aren't boiled to death (the traditional/normal method used), and are instead allowed to hatch, but this is very expensive compared to regular silk. Alternatively some genuinely/100% vegan silks made from banana waste, milkweed floss or other plants, some of which you might have already heard of (I personally do not consider spider silk to be vegan as it costs them a lot of protein and other resources to produce it).
Yarns & Ribbons
Vegan yarns can be made from many plants including banana, cotton, hemp, nettles, milkweed floss, milkweed fiber, dogbane.
World of Vegan offers this "Vegan Knitting Guide: Tips for Terrific Ethical Knits"
Reclaimed sari silk in another eco-friendly alternative that might use non-vegan silk, but helps keep those textiles from landfills, and help employ female artisans. It can be stripped into ribbons.
Natural Paints & Dyes
Many modern dyes are quite toxic, causing serious water pollution. We must remember that "natural" doesn't necessarily mean "safe" or "non-toxic" as our ancestors learned from creating colours with lead and other dangerous, but naturally occurring metals, minerals, plants. Fortunately we have modern science to help us avoid the more dangerous ingredients as we experiment with our own custom shades made from kitchen scraps and home-grown wildflowers. Click the resources in this section to learn more.
Suggested Reading
A Garden to Dye For walks you through basic safety for at-home dyers, non-toxic materials, and useful topics from making and using mordants as well as colour modifiers. Learn how to collect and make your own mordant from fallen acorns, how to do cold dye baths, hot dye baths, and even solar dying with jars left in the sun. The author started out as a gardener, and walks you through how to sustainably harvest anything from roots to flowers, how to make mordant from rusty metals, as well as kitchen waste that offers pretty colours including coffee, onion skins, and soak water from black beans if you want blue or purple!
Stuffing & Batting
Modern stuffing is almost always synthetics that support the fossil fuel industry. Our ancestors were clever and used all kinds of materials from their local ecosystem, and would add more of these stuffings to the original over time to keep their beds stuffed with Spanish moss, or their seat plump with horse hair.
We've forgotten the old options like moss, milkweed floss, and more, but here we discuss some stuffings, and where you can harvest, grow, and buy locally.
Africa
Common names: bulrush ( Eng.); papkuil, matjiesriet (Afr.); ibhuma (Zulu, Swazi); ingcongolo (Xhosa); motsitla (Sesotho)
These reeds are important wetland plants that attract wetland birds, stand eve without the help of water, and can help clean up pollutions such as heavy metals. They are considered medicinal, but the entire plant can be used. They are important sources of building and crafting materials.
Asia
Bamboo
This grows very easily with little to no ecological impact, but the process to create fibers uses energy, water, and chemicals.
Kapok
Fiber comes from the pods.
Europe
Flax
Flax fiber, linen, flax meal (used as an egg replacement in vegan baking), and oil come from this one plant.
Hemp
Hemp provides oils, fiber, nutritious hemp seeds, and more. It needs little to no irrigation, and can be grown indoors if a farmer wants to convert from factory faming animals to something more environmentally friendly.
Cotton
Cotton can require a lot of water, and diverting irrgation water to cotton has caused entire ecosystems to dry up, so finding organic/rain-fed cotton will minimize your impact.
North America
Dogbane?
Milkweed Floss
This grows naturally from Canada, throughout the USA, and down to Mexico. Famers have historically wiped it out for fear of it poisoning their livestock (yet another victim of farming's "war on wildlife"), but now even farmers are begining to understand it's many benefits. Famers for Monarchs is among the many groups who are working o help bring back milkweed, and the Monarchs who rely on this amazing plant.
This was the only vendor we've found so far, other than buying through Etsy. Please let us know if you know of other vendors we can list.
Click the Milkweed button to learn more about growing milkweed, how much actually helps monarchs (above a certain percent of space no longer improves their numbers), and which parts of the plants' anatomy is good for different uses.
Spanish Moss
Spanish moss was once used for stuffing mattresses. It's a common plant found on older trees, and falls during windy weather.
Suggested Reading
Natural Dyes for Textiles
A Garden to Dye For walks you through basic safety for at-home dyers, non-toxic materials, and useful topics from making and using mordants as well as colour modifiers. Learn how to collect and make your own mordant from fallen acorns, how to do cold dye baths, hot dye baths, and even solar dying with jars left in the sun. The author started out as a gardener, and walks you through how to sustainably harvest anything from roots to flowers, how to make mordant from rusty metals, as well as kitchen waste that offers pretty colours including coffee, onion skins, and soak water from black beans if you want blue or purple!