One of my favorite posessions (even more precious than the newly aquired salad spinner) is a cashmere scarf my dad gave me about eight years ago. I wear that thing like crazy – camping, out to dinner, on cold, wintery LA bike rides.

Unfortunately cashmere, which comes from the downy under layer of goats, is a fairly limited resource, and with Americans buying it up like crazy (10.5 million sweaters from China last year), it’s taken quite a toll on the environment. If you’ve ever known a goat, you know their objective in life is to eat. Everything. The overgrazing of priarie lands in China is causing huge swelling dust storms, which have even made their mark on North American air quality – more here and here.

What’s a cashmere loving gal to do? Luckily, my buddy Debbie loves to reclaim and reuse – one of her favorite fabrics is secondhand cashmere sweaters. She takes the torn, holed, stained discards, cuts the good squares out of them, and create high quality cashmere scarves using no new resources (except for the thread!).

Obviously, Debbie’s idea is right up my alley, so I collaborated with her to create some Valentine’s Day scarves for BTC Elements. And oh the excitement when she brought them to me last week. I ran to my favorite photographer, got a couple shots taken and voila! Valentine’s Scarves made from reclaimed sweaters at BTC Elements!