Recycled Art, finished at last

     Sorry for my month-long absence, dear readers. Its been a busy time at work, but today I was finally able to get some work done in my studio. Nothing new, mind you, but I did some good solid work on 3 works in progress. Sewed some more strips onto the 8 Gerbera pieces and made a sleeve and pinned it onto the Blade Garden quilt. And then I decided that I absolutely had to finish the recycled materials piece. Its been sitting around for a month or so, unfinished and crying out for something. Wasn't quite sure what, but something.

       So its been sitting around and I have been trying out different doodads and this and that and just haven't been happy with any of it. So I decided that today it was do or die. And after trying out a bunch of different recycled items to keep with the theme (and because you know I save all sorts of interesting stuff, of course) and here is what I came up with. You can see I ended up adding a cool beer bottle cap, two energy drink tabs, a cut-out phrase from an Altoid tin and a couple of fortune cookie fortunes. And, if you check them out in the close-up shot, you can see that they are appropriate for a piece of art.

So here's the final list of all of the recycled materials that I used in this piece. All were found around the house or used my me or my family:
-vinyl from some bedding packaging
-a piece of fabric from a repurposed vintage t-shirt
-a used dryer sheet
-bread twist ties
-beer bottle cap
-energy drink tabs
-phrase cut from an Altoid tin
-fortune cookie fortunes

Yay! I'm so pleased with it. After all of the additional items I tried (and it took me about over an hour messing around with all sorts of bits), I really liked this combination of items for their color, texture and diversity.

A post-modern composition of household ephemera

I've been reveling in the whole recycling thing lately, as you may have noticed, what with the opening of my new etsy shop and all. So a couple of weeks ago I thought I'd challenge myself with a project constructed out of completely recycled and rather nontraditional materials.

Here you can see what sparked my interest: some vinyl plastic from a mattress zippered bag, some dryer sheets and....bread twist ties! In all different colors, aren't they beautiful?? No? Well, I think they are interesting to look at and the colors are bright and compelling. Let's just see what I can start with all of this trash, hmm?

First, I cut the vinyl apart, saving the zipper for another project. I was glad to get it--finding really long zippers is really difficult at my local sources.

Then I straightened out the twist ties as much as possible and started laying them out vertically on top of the vinyl and a used dryer sheet, tryingto spread out all of the colors. I really love how these materials play off of each other in texture and origin.

So I just kept on going until I had all of my twist ties laid down and composed. Some vintage sheeting fabric was added as a backing layer for a little more depth.

Very nice! Now I had to fix the twist ties down without losing their spontaneous feel. The sewing machine was definitely out the the question, so I carefully hand sewed the twist ties down using large stitches.

I finished it with some white foam core (which then got smudged, dammit, so I have to get some more). I think this will look really inviting in a shadow box frame.

I think I'll call it: "A post-modern composition of household ephemera."

Oh. That was the title of my post. Well. How about that?

:D