ABOUT

Coachella Valley Handmade is a collaboration between two Coachella Valley locals, Anndee Laskoe of Baby Orange and Leslie Shockley of Tea With Iris, who want to share information on sustainable products made in and near the Coachella Valley.


Our mission is to: Promote a healthy planet and lifestyle by...

-making products from organic and repurposed materials

-sharing information about organic gardening and cooking

-tips on simple ways to live sustainably

Anndee Laskoe

Baby Orange

www.babyorange.com

Baby Orange is a celebration of creativity and bravery.

Our company truly started overnight by two best friends and lovers with a desire to change their lives. While their two children slept, they challenged themselves to break away from the norm and do something that satisfied their creative minds.

Baby Orange dares you to be different. Our clothing is focused on being comfy. We wanted to mix simplicity, ease, and individuality with a color palate that goes beyond tradition. Many of our designs are inspired by nature in and around the Coachella Valley, where we both grew up and currently live.

Baby Orange by Anndee Laskoe Jewelry is a mix of unique pieces all hand-made from precious stones, gems, and other deconstructed vintage finds. Anndee has always adored dressing with an element of surprise. That surprise, is what she brings to each hand-made piece in her jewelry line.

We hope to inspire you to put Baby Orange on yourself and your littlest ones, and also to go after your biggest dreams. Life is far too colorful to let it pass without trying something that makes your heart sing.

Leslie Shockley
Tea With Iris
www.teawithiris.com


My goal is to create a waste-free environment by gardening, composting, and making products from upcycled materials. All of my products are sewn with my most cherished heirloom, my grandmother's 1958 Singer Slant-O-Matic sewing machine. My prints are hand-painted from the plants in our garden.
Working as a Peace Corps volunteer in the Philippines opened my eyes to the amount of waste people consume and the detrimental effects it has on the environment. It wasn’t that the people I worked and lived with in the rural fishing community in the Philippines were more wasteful than we are; they had to deal with their waste on a daily basis and couldn’t take it to the curb every week as we do here. I feel that as consumers, we can really change the impact we have on our local and global environment by the way we choose to spend our money and really think about the life cycle each product has on our environment.
The products I make are inspired by the materials I find. A vintage linen will transform into a 60‘s-inspired dress I named the Maude dress. An extraordinary Vera linen and vinyl tablecloth will evolve into a picnic blanket. A unique embroidered linen napkin will be the pocket for a girl’s ‘happy power’ dress. If I buy virgin material, I source material from sustainable resources and that can be eventually composted once worn out, such as organic cotton, bamboo and hemp. My passion for making prints from plants in our garden came from an early appreciation of nature, growing up in the Cahuilla Hills in Palm Desert and later on in life taking botany courses in college. I’m continuously learning through nature and want to share this knowledge.

WHAT IS UPCYCLING?

It’s making something new from something old. One of my biggest inspirations in starting my business came from the book, Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make Things, by William McDonough and Michael Braungart. They state that the goal of upcycling is to prevent wasting potentially useful materials by making use of existing ones. This reduces the consumption of new raw materials when creating new products. Reducing the use of new raw materials can result in a reduction of energy usage, air pollution, water pollution and greenhouse gas emissions.

WHO IS IRIS?

Iris is our desert tortoise we adopted from the Living Desert Reserve who lives under the mesquite tree in our garden. She is about 60 years old and she is the ultimate sustainable member of our family, eating the native desert plants in our garden.