Living more creatively
in the kitchen and beyond
Originally published in the Santa Cruz Sentinel July 12, 2013
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Rachel
Santos makes her classic bucket bags from woven strips
of upcycled rubber
bicycle inner-tubes. Santos defines
“upcycling” as the process of converting
end-of-life products into new,
valuable products without using lots of energy.
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The brilliant writer Michael Pollan, famous for making Americans rethink their relationship to the land and the food they eat, spoke at Santa Cruz High School last month about his new book “Cooked: a natural history of transformation.” There are no recipes in this book about cooking. Rather, Pollan explores the act of cooking at home, because, he writes, it’s “the most important thing an ordinary person can do to help reform the American food system, to make it healthier and more sustainable.”
Pollan told the sold-out
Santa Cruz crowd that the average American spends a mere 27 minutes a day on
food preparation and another four minutes cleaning up, which is less than half
of what his mother (and mine) spent cooking and cleaning up in the 1960s. With
Americans watching 34 hours of television a week, and 8 in 10 Americans
watching the vast assortment of cooking shows, Pollan suggests that a great
many Americans are spending considerably more time watching images of cooking
on television than they are cooking themselves.
Of course what Pollan is also suggesting is that living healthier and
more sustainably is also dependent upon our willingness to live more
creatively. If creativity is a three step process—from concept, to planning, to
production—we’ve missed out completely when we merely watch others cook. What’s
more, we’ve willingly traded the smell, taste and health benefits of delicious
home cooking for a passive bit of entertainment.
So, it’s all the more amazing when you discover people who don’t fit
the reality-TV-watching demographic, who spend their time creating things that promote
sustainability and self-sufficiency and do it without a recipe before them—who
spend time imagining, engineering, and then executing, and who aren’t afraid to
learn through trial and error.
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Held
last month at the School of Visual Arts Theatre
in New York City, the
Independent Handbag Designer
Awards recognizes and discovers new designer talent
and creativity across an array of handbag categories.
Rachel Santos, of
Dante Robles Design in Aromas, won
in the Timberland Best Green Handbag category, for her
classic bucket bag made from sustainable, recycled materials.
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Rachel Santos is one such person. A resident of Aromas, she recently traveled
to New York City for the first time in her life, to become a winner in the 7th
Annual Independent Handbag Designer Awards. Attended by industry notables, the
award ceremony honored winners in six categories, and Santos’s lovely woven
bucket bag won the Timberland Best Green Handbag award, which requires the bag
be made out of sustainable, recycled or organic materials.
She loves to ask others what they think her shiny black bags are made
from, because the usual guess is leather. Folks are surprised when she tells
them the leather is actually reclaimed bicycle inner-tubes. Her handbags don’t
look, smell or feel like bicycle inner-tubes, because they’ve been utterly
transformed.
To win such a prestigious award is all the more amazing when you learn
that she began working with rubber as a textile only a year ago. But it seemed
to be the perfect fit for a woman with a degree in environmental studies, a
15-year career working in open space preservation, and a family-nurtured talent
for crafting. In her line of work especially, she is constantly considering
end-of-life (EOL) materials and asking herself how they could be resurrected
and given new life.
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Besides
handbags, Santos also uses the rubber and valves from spent
inner-tubes to make
bracelets.
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After briefly working with EOL neoprene wetsuits, she switched to rubber
inner-tubes from road and mountain bikes, since they were easier to stretch and
weave, and very easy to come by. Every two months she stops by Specialized
Bicycle Components in Morgan Hill, who hand over 4 or 5 boxes of spent inner-tubes
they’ve collected for her.
“Initially I was just having fun,” she says about her handbag design.
Then her husband, who has experience in marketing new products, was impressed
with her design, and told her, “I think it has legs,” she remembers. He
encouraged her “to go out in front of people and get their feedback.” And in
the process, she learned that her design was something extraordinary.
In developing her handbags from scratch, she had to discover ways of
working with an unfamiliar material. “You have to get used to the way it moves
and feels,” she says. “You have to adapt to the material.” So she learned how
to carefully cut open the tubes, wash off the inner coating of talc, allow the
rubber smell to off-gas, and cut them into even strips. She tried various
cutting methods until her husband developed a rotary cutting system.
With her woodworking skills, she created a loom for weaving panels of
inner-tubes. She then invested in a Juki industrial sewing machine with a
Teflon pressure foot, for sewing the woven rubber the panels into handbags. “I
was experimenting, prototyping,” she says. “The Juki allowed me to do so much
more.” She also incorporates other parts from inner-tubes, like the Presta
valves, into her handbag designs. Besides her winning bucket bag, she’s created
a clutch, a satchel and a cross-body handbag.
Santos would like to develop her inner-tube weaving into a line of
clothing, and participate in the Fashion Art runway show in Santa Cruz, but for
now she’ll concentrate on working with Timberland to reproducing her handbag
for sale in their flagship stores across the county. “The fashion industry has
started to reduce their carbon footprint,” says Santos, and she is pleased to
be working with the outdoor clothing retailer, Timberland. “They have a
consciousness of moving in that direction.” Timberland makes footwear and
outerwear from recycled, organic and renewable materials, and even builds their
stores in a sustainable way using repurposed and reclaimed materials.
The future looks pretty bright for Santos and her label “Dante Robles
Design,” as she scrambles to market her handbags through social media and by
making industry connections. “I met quite a few of the leaders of the handbag
industry in New York, and some manufacturers,” she says. And “some of the other
contestants in the competition want to collaborate with me in the future.” She’s
also thrilled that her winning handbag will be featured in the September issue
of InStyle Magazine and Bicycling Magazine.
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The
oak leaf, with its stem pointing upwards, is the perfect symbol for
the
upcycled materials Rachel Santos uses in her handbags.
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“Dante Robles” is Latin for “enduring oaks,” and Santos has added an
aluminum oak leaf to her bags with an upward-pointing arrow on the stem—the
perfect symbol not only for the extended life of the upcycled materials she
uses, but also for the upward trajectory of Santos’ career as a handbag maker.
“[Winning this competition] has been a great launching pad,” she says.
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