Week Eleven- Recycled Sweater Flowers

Recycled sweaters are one of favorite materials to use.  They come in an endless variety of colors and patterns and are easy to come by.  (Especially if you love garage sales and thrift stores like I do).

The flowers were made using recycled sweaters, wool scraps, buttons, wire and wooden beads.

Garage Sales!!

The garage sale season has unofficially started in my town.  The season usually lasts from Blossom Festival weekend (April) until well into October.  This means I spend time each Friday- Sunday hunting garage sales for treasures I didn't know I always needed.  Here are a handful of the treasures I came home with last weekend.

Books were 25 cents each.

Art supplies $2 a box

pastels, watercolors, new eraser, pencil sharpener, pencils

basket was FREE

enamel on steel set of 4 bowls for  $2

Mastering the Art of French Cooking in hardback for $1

(This book is in perfect condition and costs $40 new!)

Total= $7.75

I can't wait for next weekend!

Challenge #2- Discarded Cassette and VHS Tapes

Here is what was made with February's challenge material, discarded cassette and VHS Tapes.

Tape Invaders- by Jess Caudill

Crocheted VHS Tape basket

Hand embroidered with cassette tape ribbon

Light switch- by Owen Stolte

Girl and her dog- by Annika and Dillon

Organizational boxes made with VHS Tape covers

Cassette ribbon lamp shade and cassette tape lamp stand

Cassette tape chair

Week Ten- Crocheted Flowers

I was determined to learn how to crochet this month.  I have have been single crocheting for many years.  My mother taught me how to single crochet when I was a little girl and I made all sorts of  projects with my limited knowledge.  I even remember crocheting myself a pair of gloves making up a pattern as I went along, when I was about 10 years old.

But, now I felt ready to REALLY crochet, so I headed to YouTube to find myself a teacher.  (Have you discovered yet how you can learn just about anything on YouTube?)  I found a number of great tutorials, cozied up on the couch with my laptop, crochet hook and yarn, and learned how to make a flower.  In about a half an hour I had finished my first project using double, 1/2 double and even triple crochet!  What I loved best was that I could stop and rewind the video whenever I needed a little more time or needed a quick refresher on how to do a step.  I was so excited about finishing my first flower that I put it in my purse and brought it to school when I picked up the kids to show it off to my daughter's teacher (a crochet enthusist).

Since completing my first flower, I have made a handful of them.   I am not sure what they will become.  Maybe a colorful wreath?  For the time being, they will hang out the with the rest of the yarn in my yarn basket making the unused skeins jealous.

Week Nine- Embroidery with Cassette Tape

The challenge material for the month of February was discarded cassette tapes, so this is one of the projects that came from that burst of inspiration.  I used the cassette tape as my embroidery thread which gave the project a shiny effect.

My first attempt with using the cassette tape as embroidery thread was a craft fail.  I had assumed I would need a loosely woven material as the background in order for the thread to pass through.  My first project was done on a discarded burlap coffee sack.   The thread ended up looking messy.  When I tried again with this lightweight canvas material, the cassette tape ended up looking and behaving more like embroidery thread.

Week Eight- Craft Box

I used to have one of these tool organization boxes when I was teaching and stored all of my paper clips, erasers, white out, etc. .  I found this golden rod colored box at a thrift store for a dollar along with this 70's retro contact paper.  Now I can organize my small craft materials, and the kids' homework supplies... paper clips, glue sticks, pencil sharpeners, tape, paint brushes, brads.

Middle School Art Class Taking on the Challenge

Yesterday I went to an after school Middle School art class to talk about the Repurposing Project.  This month we are creating with used cassette and VHS tapes.  There were about  6 Middle Schoolers who came to the class eager to create.  I told them about the project and once the materials were handed out, they started pulling the ribbon out of the cassette and asking for a screwdriver to take the cassette tapes apart.  You could almost see the ideas forming in their heads about what they were going to make with the challenge material.

This is the pile of ribbon that came out of a handful of cassettes.

The ribbon looked like a pile of hair, so sparked the idea of making a person with the cassette tapes with the ribbon as the hair.

 The cassette tape person is being assembled.

A glue gun works perfectly.  Thanks girls for the idea!

 After some trial and error, it was decided that silver Sharpie worked best on the cassette tapes for decoration.

Cassette tape necklace!!  I can see a fad starting!

 This pile of supplies will soon become a telephone.

 Come to First Friday on March 2nd from 5pm-8pm at the Columbia Art Center in Hood River to see how the projects turned out.