Designer Gary Harvey exhibited a wedding gown at one show made out of nearly 40 copies of the Financial Times, then did it again with a different magazine when asked to demonstrate one at another show.

Of course, that's only one drastic way of making wedding dresses. There's one website called Cheap Chic Weddings that, yearly, sponsors a contest where people have to make wedding dresses out of things such as toilet paper. The dresses have to be strong enough to hold up for an entire wedding, and often people bid on the winners.

But these are dresses outside of the norm of ?green?. The basic for creating ?green? wedding gowns is to either use recycled or reusable fabrics, or using fabrics that are created from plants that are environmentally friendly. The most popular material for green wedding dresses is hemp silk organza, which ends up being the major portion of the dress, which is not only environmentally friendly, but cost effective, as these dresses usually come in under $1,000.

But green doesn't always mean inexpensive. There's another type of ?green? silk known as ?peace silk?, cultivated by allowing moths to emerge from their cocoons to live out their full life cycle, rather than the traditional way of having it made by killing moths before coming out of the cocoon by dipping them in boiling water, or by piercing them with a needle, allowing the whole cocoon to be unraveled as one continuous thread. In this case, the silk is degummed (the process of removing silk gum from silk) and spun instead of being reeled, resulting in soft, fluffy silk. It's rare, and therefore expensive, but it fits the green qualifications perfectly.

There are many more fabrics and many more ways to get ?green? for your special wedding; all it takes is a little research and a belief in the dream.