365 new dresses for $365 in 365 days. That’s the happiness goal of sorts Marisa Lynch set for herself when, just months before her 30th birthday, she got laid off. Losing a job means hitting the streets with a resume to some, wallowing in grief for others. But for Marisa, it meant getting the sewing machine out and upcycling thrifted fashions. Every day.

“I was just in this not-feeling-good, crummy kind of mood, and I didn’t know how to kick it,” says Marisa. That’s when Marisa saw Julie & Julia. “[Julie] was finding something to do every day that made her feel great. I was jealous. I thought, I want to find that.”

Thus, New Dress A Day entered the blogosphere. The task: To make a new fashion piece a day — on a budget of a dollar a day — for an entire year.

Think the uber-frugal budget and tight turnaround requirements can only mean shoddy, unfashionable duds? Not for Marisa. All you have to do is see take a quick glance at New Dress A Day to see that while this West Hollywood resident may be short on money and time, she’s never short on style.

She’s also got an imaginative fashion sense, serious sewing skills, and some awe-inspiring powers of transformation. In each of her daily posts, Marisa shares the story — and impressively fugly before photo — of an old vintage dress found at a thrift shop or garage sale. Then comes the chic and cute after photo — along with details of where she wore the new-again outfit and how it was received. Earlier this month, for example, Marisa took a somewhat frightening-looking blue gown reminiscent of a Disney magician’s suit, and transformed it into a cool blue shirt perfect for her outing to a Dodger game!

Always a fan of thrift stores, Marisa says she loves the “romanticism of wearing clothes from earlier time.” Marisa grew up seeing her mom — a home economics major in college — sewing things around the home, then learned to sew herself in a home economics class in 7th grade. Though she didn’t sew often, she did carry a DIY purse to her prom, made for just $4 using directions from a Sassy magazine.

Now, Marisa sews every day, under a deadline. The time commitment’s quite considerable. Marisa usually goes thrifting and garage sale hopping on the weekends — Jet Rag‘s $1 Sunday sales and the Melrose Trading Post are among her favorite stops — picking up dresses to overhaul during the next week or so. Once home, each trash-to-treasure transformation takes anywhere between 25 minutes to a couple hours, depending on the condition of the original garment and the desired design.

While she sometime gets an immediate idea about what to do with a piece when she first sees it, most designs take more time to evolve. “I’m picking stuff because of the fabrics and because of the patterns — and maybe because of the great hardware or the buttons on the sleeve,” Marisa says.

Marisa’s first post’s dated Nov. 27, 2009, but her birthday is actually in mid-October. That day’s when she upcycled her first dress for the project — but New Dress a Day didn’t officially launch until about a month later, when Marisa got the mechanics of blogging figured out. Starting Nov. 28 though, the outfit in the post is the outfit Marisa wore that day.

Marisa’s now 194 days into the project, working to juggle thrifting, designing, sewing, and blogging alongside her job at a music company and her social life. What happens once the 365 days are up? At the moment, she’s thinking about partnering up with a charity or other organization, perhaps auctioning off the 365 creations and donating the proceeds.

But those and other loose ideas have yet to be stitched together into a stylish plan. “I don’t know what I’m going to do,” she says. “But I’m not gonna stop.” Expect Marisa to keep on sewing and blogging at New Dress A Day until Nov. 26, 2010 — and beyond.

Photos courtesy of Marisa Lynch

If you love TOMS’ comfy shoes — but feel short wearing those flats — here’s good eco-fashion news for you. TOMS just debuted a new style that lets you stand tall: TOMS Wedges.

How tall? 3 1/4 inches taller than you actually are. TOMS Wedges make use of some green materials like jute, and as with all shoes made by this socially-conscious shoe company, gives a pair of shoes to a child in need per pair sold.

I’m actually not quite sure how I feel about this canvas-jute combo look. Among other issues, the idea of high-heeled TOMS kind of remind me of flipflops with kitten heels, which to me sort of defeat the casual and comfy purpose of flipflops.

But I’m willing to expand my idea of eco-chic…. What do you think — Are TOMS Wedges your style? If so, you can own a pair of your own for $69.

Earlier:
>> TOMS Shoes pop-up store in Venice
>> Casual, everyday shoes for environmentalists

Photo via TOMS

Except — DIYing isn’t so empowering if you suck at it.

One need only browse through Regretsy — the website and now book that features the fugliest of craft site Etsy — to know that green projects can go wrong, way wrong. A big chunk of Regretsy’s fodder comes from would-be upcyclers — who apparently have a lot more eco-awareness than ability. From a “crapeau” made from wrappers (right) to a clock made from a rusty cheese grater, trash from the landfill is often turned not into treasure, but uglier trash.

The same, sadly, goes for other eco-DIY projects. Take composting, for example. Ideally, composting lets you prevent veggie scraps from going to the landfill while creating free, rich, organic fertilizer for your backyard garden. Unfortunately, for Lisa of Condo Blues, composting created Dog Vomit Slime Mold. Yep — That is in fact the name for the “yellow spongy, foamy and phallic looking blob” growing on Lisa’s composter in Columbus, Ohio.

Boy did it ever stink! Bad…. Oh and just you [sic] gross you out a little further, when I emptied the bin I found a nice big family of maggots in my compost.

Yummy.

Then there’s the case of eco-adventurer Leslie Richard, author of The Oko Box blog, who got a composting toilet. Now ideally, a composting toilet turns human waste into rich fertilizer while keeping things clean and odor-free — no indoor plumbing required! In real life, environmentalists make human errors — like waiting too long to empty the urine container:

When I finally at a glance saw that it looked ‘almost’ full I went ahead to dump it out…….

NOT realizing it was more then full & had just hit it’s capacity at the top, filling up into the draining part of the toilet – when i took the toilet apart to open the lid and casually pull out the little urine holder the URINE EXPLODED, SPiLLeD out like a waterfall into the bucket that holds the container!!!!! THEN onto the floor! and on my hands!!

BLECh blech bleCh……

If the smell and experience wasn’t bad enough…. When i started undoing the bolts to take the secondary container out to for washing off, the freaking bolts would fall off RIGHT into the overspill puddle of urine!! Gawd and Babee Jezuz!!!!

Then there are the eco-kitchen snafus. Cooking or baking yourself makes it easier to opt for local and organic ingredients, to avoid weird chemicals and processed crap, and to reduce unnecessary food packaging. And fellow Blogher contributor Beth Terry, a.k.a. Fake Plastic Fish, especially wanted to reduce one-use plastic packaging — which is why she decided to bake her own pita bread.

Alas, her baking inexperience meant that after misreading 1 and 1/4 cups of water as just 1/4 cup, Beth just kept following the recipe — no matter that her “dough” did not feel like doughy, much less rise:

I put them in the oven to see what would happen. And what happened are these little bread stepping stones. The outside is hard. The inside is heavy and doughy. And the pocket… um… let’s just forget that they were supposed to be pockets….

Oh, and by the way, in my attempt to bake my own pitas in order to save plastic, I bought a plastic packet of yeast and didn’t even think about it until tonight!

Does this mean you shouldn’t attempt eco-DIY projects? Of course not. Lisa got some composting advice and realized her pile was just too moist; she’s since drilled more drainage holes into her compost bin and plans to pay more attention to the mixture. Leslie’s still uses her composting toilet, heeding the big lesson she’s learned: “MAKE SuRe the urine level doesn’t overflow!!!” And as for Beth, well, she ate those stepping stones anyway. “They taste okay,” was her verdict.

As for me — Perhaps my biggest green failures have happened in my balcony garden, on which I tried to grow tomatoes for years. Number of tomato plants murdered: A couple dozen. Number of tomato plants that survived a surprisingly long time by growing into a twisted, mutated plant: One. Number of tomatoes produced: Zero.

Now, I grow chard.

Photos top to bottom: thrafthappy/Etsy via Regretsy, Lisa / Condo Blues, Beth Terry / Fake Plastic Fish

[crossposted on Blogher]

The shoe may be called Green Silence, but Brooks’ new eco-friendly kickers don’t come quietly onto the green market — thanks to their dazzling yellow hue. As my fellow MNN blogger Shea Gunther says, these shoes should be renamed Yellow Scream!

While environmentalists may ponder why Brooks chose to make its greenest footwear look like a subliminal advertisement for McDonald’s, most will likely agree that Green Silence are about the greenest running shoes out there today. For one, the obnoxious yellow hue’s actually produced using non-toxic dyes and colorants!

Even ignoring the loud eco-color, Green Silence shoes do look decidedly different because it has half as many parts as a regular shoe, reducing the need for materials, energy, and glues. The shoe’s tongue, for example, is a continuous extension of the shoe’s outer side. What glued parts there are are kept together with water-based adhesives.

More impressively, 75% of the shoe’s made out of post-consumer recycled materials! Recycled CDs, for example, make up 50% of the shoe’s heel, while recycled rubber makes up 30% of the outsole. Most of the fabric part of the shoe’s made with a blend of recycled PET from used water bottles — with the laces, gillies (loops for shoelaces), and reinforced webbing being 100% recycled PET.

What’s not recycled is biodegradable — though obviously nowhere near as biodegradable as your average apple. According to Brooks, the midsole and insole break down “50 times faster than traditional midsoles in an enclosed, active landfill” — an interesting feat, although this does point out that the shoe will indeed end up in a landfill at the end of its life, as running shoes inevitably do. With that end in mind, Brooks has put together a helpful “Shoe Life Cycle” guide which shows people how to get the most out of their running shoes before sending them to the landfill.

I took the shoes out for a test run and liked the shoes’ light but cushioned feel! I was a little concerned that the semi tongue-less feature of the shoe might make them feel funny or unstable, but the shoes held firm. The permeable mesh uppers kept my feet cool too.

My main complaint: I had to stick to alleyways and unpopular streets so as not to blind anyone with my yellow feet — or unwittingly end up on a fashion faux-pas site, which is why the photo of the shoes above don’t have my feet in them. Seriously — The shoes look even more garish and bright in real life than in the photos!

Unfortunately, while the $100-a-pair Green Silence shoes will start shipping in their 100% post-consumer recycled box come February, they will not be offered in any other color combos. We’ll find out next month whether eco-conscious runners are willing to embrace looking like Ronald McDonald for the sake of the environment….

Earlier:
>> New Balance 070: Greener shoes for active eco-volunteers
>> Casual, everyday shoes for environmentalists

Top photo via Brooks; bottom photo by Siel

>> Jasmin at Ecouterre hearts these upcycled straw rings, but I have to say I find Jasmin’s colorful writing cuter than the rings themselves. Compare the photo to the right to Jasmin’s description — “Schailon’s cheery, candy-colored rings are topped off with anemone-like floral flourishes that invite you to drink in their quirky beauty” — and tell me which you think is prettier. Would you wear that ring?

>> Musical neckties made with recycled tape! A sonic fabric necktie could make a great eco-fashion statement at the next Green Drinks.