Posts Tagged ‘fashion’

More and more people are designing handcrafted jewelry than ever before. Making your own custom jewelry is a fun way to relax while still feeling productive knowing that you’re making a beautiful piece of jewelry that can be worn or sold. While many people only make their jewelry using traditional materials you can really make hand crafted jewelry out of just about any material available and you are only limited by your own imagination. In fact, some of these non-traditional materials can be much less expensive than traditional jewelry supplies, especially if you make your own beads.

Using your own home made beading supplies can present some interesting challenges, but it can also lead you to design some amazingly creative handcrafted! The first step is often figuring out how you’re going to mount your items on a string or chain and the next challenge is working out how you’re going to make it both beautiful and wearable at the same time! By using unique jewelry materials you’ll be able to create some good discount beads.Here are some surprising things you can make jewelry out of:

Make Beads From Dried Seeds: Almost everyone has tried to make popcorn strings for a Christmas tree, and the principals behind using beans or seeds at a jewelry item is not much different. The key is to pick beans that are durable and dependable. To string dried food items you’ll probably have to either use a tension mounting system of some sort or drill a hole through them. Then you will want to protect your new beads with a spray on sealant to make sure they don’t break and shatter.

Make Paper Bead Jewelry: This is a clever idea that dates back to the Victorian times when making beads out of paper was a popular hobby. To make your own custom paper beads you just cut out strips of paper and roll them around a toothpick and then apply a little glue to keep them together. You may want to seal these as well so they don’t fray and get damaged at the first hint of humidity. You can play with different types of paper, different colors and even different shaped strips of paper when creating your beads.

If you run your own custom jewelry business, then you know how expensive beads can be. Making your own beads is a creative way to save money on your costs while still producing quality jewelry. Since you already know how to make your own beaded jewelry then you probably already possess the talent and even the tools to make plenty of cheap beads that can be turned into beautiful jewelry!

Do you like making your own beaded jewelry? You can save more money by learning how to find wholesale bead sellers online and use other methods for getting your beading supplies at a discount!

Food miles is a term which refers to the distance food is transported from the time of its production until it reaches the consumer. It is one dimension used in assessing the environmental impact of food. The concept of food miles originated in 1990 in the United Kingdom. It was conceived by Andrea Paxton, who wrote a research paper that discussed the fact that food miles are the distance that food travels from the farm it is produced on to the kitchen in which it is being consumed (Iles, 2005, p.163). Engelhaupt (2008) states, that “food miles is the distance food travels from farm to plate, are a simple way to gauge food’s impact on climate change” (p. 3482). Food travels between 1,500 to 2,500 miles (4,000 km) every time that it is delivered to the consumer. The travel of products from the farms to the consumers is 25 percent farther now than it was in 1980 (”Counting our food miles,” 2007). Some scholars believe that the pollution is created due to the globalization of trade overseas; the focus of food supply bases into fewer, larger supplies; the drastic change in the delivery pattern; increase in processing and packaging foods; and making fewer trips to the supermarket. Others state that the GHG (Greenhouse Gas) emissions are created by the production phases which create 83 percent, 8.1 tons of CO2 foot printing. (Engelhaupt, E., 2008). Recent studies in America and the UK indicate that about 80% of food emissions are produced before the food leaves the farm gate. [1] The goal of the Environmental Protection Agencies is to make people aware of the environment impacts of food miles and show the pollution percentage and the energy used to transport food over long distances, at this time there are researchers that are working to provide the public with more information.

Overview

The concept of food miles is part of a broader issue of sustainability which deals with a large range of environmental issues, including local food. The term was coined by Tim Lang (now Professor of Food Policy, City University, London) who says: “The point was to highlight the hidden ecological, social and economic consequences of food production to consumers in a simple way, one which had objective reality but also connotations.” [2] However, it has increasingly come under attack as an ineffective means of finding the true environmental impact.[3]

A DEFRA report in 2005 undertaken by researchers at AEA Technology Environment, entitled The Validity of Food Miles as an Indicator of Sustainable Development, included findings that “the direct environmental, social and economic costs of food transport are over 9 billion each year, and are dominated by congestion.”

Recent findings indicate that it is not only how far the food has traveled but the method of travel that is important to consider. The positive environmental effects of specialist organic farming may be offset by increased transportation, unless it is produced by local farms. But even then the logistics and effects on other local traffic may play a big role.[citation needed] Also, many trips by personal cars to shopping centers would have a negative environmental impact compared to a few truck loads to neighborhood stores that can be easily accessed by walking or cycling.

Food miles in business

Business leaders have adopted food miles as a model for understanding inefficiency in a food supply chain. Wal-Mart, famously focused on efficiency, was an early adopter of food miles as a profit-maximizing strategy. More recently, Wal-Mart has embraced the environmental benefits of supply chain efficiency as well. In 2006, Wal-Mart, CEO, Lee Scott said, “The benefits of the strategy are undeniable, whether you look through the lens of greenhouse gas reduction or the lens of cost savings. What has become so obvious is that ‘a green strategy’ provides better value for our customers”.[4] Wal-Mart has since made a series of environmental commitments that suggest the company is looking more holistically at supply chain sustainability, such as restricting seafood suppliers to fisheries independently certified as sustainable, a practice that may increase food miles.[4] Still it is undeniable that Wal-Mart’s strategy of using supply chains from as far away as China exorbitantly increases greenhouse emissions. They are often criticized for “green washing” and only adopting large-scale green tactics, which make them appear earth-friendly but actually have little positive environmental impact.[citation needed]

Some other alternatives for reducing food miles are to create Co-op grocery stores. A Co-op is a small business strictly owned and managed by its members. The way that this works is that people come together, they create equity and then they purchase their products. They grow organic food and their food miles are drastically reduced. “Choosing to buy organic has value, the hidden costs of shopping increase substantially when road miles are factored in”(Holt and Watson, 2008, p. 321). The first co-op was created in 1844 in England with twenty-eight people. They started out by selling just sugar, flour, butter and oatmeal. Today there are over 47,000 coop corporations in the United States alone. Not only are Co-op markets reducing the food miles, but they are also providing the consumers with healthy food, organic food. The facts and figures for 2005 state that organic foods contains higher levels of vitamin C, calcium, magnesium, iron, phosphorus and chromium; and 15 percent lower levels of nitrates (Siner, 1996).

In one of my earlier articles, I had talked about the importance of getting lots of back links to your site in order to rank well in the search engines. Building links is also known as Off Page Optimization.

Websites that link back to your site and the page rank of those websites are important. Linking with irrelevant websites dont count with the search engines and is a wasted effort. How do search engines decide about the relevance of the website linking back to your website?

Search engines also consider the anchor text used in linking back to your site. For example, if your website is about dating than the anchor text: dating tips may be given more importance than the anchor text: recommended website.

Search engines also like to take into account the page title of the site page that is linking to your site. Some sites are considered to be authority sites by the search engines. Back links from authority sites are very valuable.

In nutshell, you have to be careful in deciding about the websites that should link back to you. Those websites should be related to your sites niche. They should be considered as authority sites and the anchor text used to link back to your site should contain your site related keyword.

In other words, getting lots of back links from authority sites is what counts with the search engines. How to get lots of back links from authority sites?

You must have heard about social book marking sites and how they work. Social book marking sites like digg, stumbleupon, furl, del.icio.us, propeller etc are considered as authority sites by search engines especially Google. Most of these social sites have a page rank of 6+.

If you can bookmark your website on these sites, you can get lots of quality one way links. Dont forget, many people visit these social bookmarking sites, so you can get many visitors in addition to back links as well.