With the fall season just around the corner, we’re trekking around with umbrellas and galoshes, trying to keep ourselves and the stuff we’re carrying dry. These cool shoulder bags by VivaTerra may be just the thing to keep our loot safe from the rain — they’re made from real boat sails!

Each of the larger bags has an inside panel showing the authenticity of the sail, naming which vessel it came from, and the tote bag handles are made from nautical rope. I like!

Ken Kobrick and Angela Greene of Passchal have transformed discarded truck and tractor tire inner tubes into a line of stylish, trendy leather goods.

It’s almost impossible to imagine that these stylish, refined bags are handmade from the monstrous-looking tires that we see on construction sites. They’ve added a nifty feature to each of their bags — a little light that clicks on every time the bag is opened — no more blindly rummaging through your bag for your keys on a dark night!

Since its launch in May of 2004, Passchal bags have received quite a bit of media attention — they were featured in the goodies bag at the 2004 Billboard Music Awards and in the Call2Recycle at the Olympus Fashion Week NYC 2005  — just to name a couple on the long list!

I found out about the Candadian Design Resource and the work of design school graduate Cristina Covello through NOTCOT, an online network that features innovations in current design through the dialogue of readers.

Cristina uses discarded materials like old tin cans and plastic shopping bags, and redesigns them into new, functional, eco-friendly products. The tin can wall storage is a great way to organize magazine, mail, stationery, and other bits and pieces that seem to gather in a cluttered pile on the tabletop.

She has also created a lighting series made from used grocery bags that she arranges into a pattern and stitches with colored thread to create soft, glowing lampshades. What a great idea! …. though I like these lights, I can’t get over how cool the tin can storage looks! I want!

Graphic artist and book designer Nicole Lecht puts a refreshing twist on wedding guest books by creating the “blessing book“:

Instead of a conventional book filled with signatures, guests are given a little card where they can write messages to the newlyweds and tuck these well-wishes into little envelopes attached to the pages of the book. A lovely treat for both the newlyweds and the guests, each envelope is lined with antique wallpaper pieces, with each being a different design.

In addition to the blessing books, Nicole’s extensive portfolio freshly{blended} includes other handmade books and eye-catching print designs. In her spare time, she shares her love of books and paper goods on her blog, and is working on a new project — mini sketchbooks made from vintage wallpapers. I can’t wait to see more of your beautiful work Nicole!

These are just so much fun! Tiffany Tomato takes reclaimed food boxes, resizes them, and rubber-stamps an imprint on the back of each, to make ingenious little food box postcards.

Those are just one of the many useful things she’s made from recycled materials — her shop also includes notebooks made with food box covers, keychains made from wine corks, and recycled bottle cap magnets (these are my favorite!).

She shares how to make eco-friendly things with tutorials that include: a shopping bag made from an old sports jersey, a basket made from a juice carton and plastic shopping bags, and a placemat woven from a cereal box. So clever!

With each dress made from vintage materials and every face carefully painted by hand, London designer Anarosemarie’s line of dolls look like they’re ready to attend a royal ball! She also makes a line of fun, quirky dolls dressed in everyday clothes. You can see the entire collection of dolls on her website.

Being so adept with needle, thread and fabric, Anarosemarie also makes other sewn accessories, including plump little pincushions, dresses, bags, and kerchiefs.

All this started seven years ago, when she began giving away her handmade dolls as presents. Soon, people were commissioning her to make them. Now, between raising her teenage daughters and working during the school year, she spends her time sewing new dolls and updating her website and blog so that more people will know about Anarosemarie. Best wishes to you and your business Ana!

Little Lamb Blue of Toronto, Canada makes the most beautiful hardcover books! Each sturdy journal is bound with up to a 100 blank pages, decorated with fun endpapers and finished with eye-catching cover designs.

Since my favorite ice cream flavor is mint chocolate chip, I was jumping in delight when I saw her Chocolate Mint book.  My other favorites are the trendy little sewing tags journal, and the adorable hansel and gretel notebook which is made from vintage fabric.

All these lovely creations are made in her amazingly tidy crafts studio (that is filled with many pieces of found and thrifted furniture)! She also makes crochet bags and other knitted accessories. You can see her entire collection on the Little Lamb Blue flickr page.

What happens to those old school directories that are printed in bulk but are useless at the end of each year? MIT students seem to have found an answer to that. In the computer science library of the Stata Center (which was designed by architect Frank Gehry), there is a rocking chair made from reclaimed campus directories that can support a person’s weight up to 125 pounds. There’s also a little sidetable built from pieces of old hardcovers, a clock, an umbrella, a bookshelf, and a lighting installation, all made from pieces of unwanted old books. Each of these pieces was created by students as part of a course exploring how to use discarded materials as building blocks.

How did they decide which books could be chopped up as construction material? They used the ones that had been placed in at least two book sales but still hadn’t been picked up. That way, no librarians or booklovers were offended!

Luce Beaulieu, the creator of Posch in Montreal, Canada makes stylish, silkscreen shopping bags from 100% vintage pillowcases and bedsheets. And these trendy handmade bags pack quite a punch — the shoulder bag can hold up to 40 pounds of groceries, and the handheld tote carries up to 20 pounds!

The POSCH shoulder bag and handbag designs are already creating quite a bit of buzz, receiving honorable mention in the Canadian Sustainable Design Competition, and attention in both style and fashion magazines for having such a great look while at the same time being so environmentally-saavy. My current canvas bag is just about ready to retire, so I’m thinking of one of these!

I first saw Scrapile furniture at 3r Living, in the form of a stunning bedframe, lights and drawers. I was stunned to find out that each of them is made from pieces of repurposed scrap wood. I rushed to the front of the store to ask about pricing and production time for a queen-size bedframe and was told it would be at least a four month wait due to the surge in demand for these designs by Bart Bettencourt and Carlos Salgado. I didn’t get the bedframe, but I do still have my eye on some of their other amazing pieces.