Mah Crafty Space

Those of us who clutter and embellish and adorn the world with previously un-thought of creations seem to have a need for a corner, a room, a table that becomes our work space. I have a love seat. I sit on one half of it and I put stuff on the other half of it. This is what it looks like:

I can hardly believe it myself, but that is my bottom half strewn about with my paper cutouts for collage, or my "paper dolls" as my mother calls it. I made the table with beer bottle caps for my husband last Christmas, the opening in the middle is just big enough for a beer in a cozy. I'm surrounded with yarn and magazines and glue and other necessities of life, content as a wren in her nest. It's sad, really, just sad. but when I'm sitting there, I'm happy, all I need is around me, and if my husband and son are home too, well, usually there's no place I'd rather be.                                                                                                                                  

Confetti and Other Things

I love to cut pictures out of magazines and then stick them together in other ways. I call it collage, but it can be seen as simple rearrangement of fragments of ideas. My favorite materials are catalogs, but I like magazines and I collect and save a wide variety of different topics.

What to do with the collages I make is sometimes an issue because while they all have a theme, their use is not always apparent. For instance, I made a Christmas theme one last year, scanned it into the computer and put "Have a Very O'Bryan Christmas!"on top of the picture and used it as the inside of my Christmas cards. Friends and family were baffled. Did you cut out every single one of those Santa Clauses, they asked. Well, yes I did, and the reindeer antlers and a lot of other things besides. I find it relaxing to dissect the printed pages into useable for something else files. I have a load of envelopes with sorted out in theme cutouts. My father asked me one time if it limited my creativity to have just one theme at a time to look at. I thought about it for awhile, then dumped all the cutouts into a tray. While it did suggest things I hadn't thought of, I was soon sorting again because I needed an envelope of various kinds of florals, and snarling at Dad under my breath.
Here is something I did for Halloween this year

Isn't he cute? And the whole can came out good, I thought. It's a can that used to hold breadcrumbs.

Here's another view:

             

That's the other side. Just a bunch of pictures cobbled together in an artistic fashion, maybe, to tell a story.

This is the goth can from my store, It's a little harder to get pictures with a dark theme, so it took several magazines of unusual types to get the pictures for this one. And the piece of a bird wing I found just like that on the ground outside my house.