I've had quite a productive weekend, but I'm not quite sure how much to tell you about it. Still, I've been a bit quiet in blogworld lately, so maybe I should explain why. I have a secret obsession and I know it's weird but if I don't give into it every now and again, it just gets worse until I do.
There isn't a fancy way to describe it. I like making things from things other people throw away. I like the whole idea of turning rubbish into something useful. That in itself isn't weird. I know a lot of you out there like doing this too, whether it's upcycling vintage clothes, giving beat-up furniture a lick of paint, or using found objects to make jewellery.
No, I didn't make this lovely sea-glass necklace, but what a lovely thing to make from found objects!
The first quilts I made many many years ago were all made from dressmaking scraps and old shirts. (I remember a log cabin quilt I made using silks, cottons and corduroys. Not a good idea to mix these!) But that's not weird, that's just keeping the tradition going of "making do or doing without".
No, my weird obsession is that I like to make stuff from thrown-away office supplies. Yes, I said office supplies. I don't know why. I just do. I work in a large organisation and an awful lot of stuff gets thrown out. I hate the idea of it ending up in landfill just because people don't need it anymore. I clean it, fix it, and find it a new home if possible (within the company of course).
But sometimes this is not possible. For example, I've ended up with a stockpile of used floppy diskettes. We can't reuse them in my company because we no longer have this technology, and I can't give them away because of the data security issue. But once I figured out how to remove the floppy disks from inside without cracking the diskette cases, I started making these recycled floppy-disk containers.
And that's what I did on Saturday - made another batch of these (actually three DOZEN) containers. They are kitschy and daggy and definitely not retro-cool, but my colleagues find them useful for pens/pencils and clips/etc so I know they won't go to waste.
So, I have fed my crazy obsession once again and put it back in its box, and now I feel like I can go back to being normal. Well, my version of normal.
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