Thursday, February 2, 2012

Transfers and tinkering

I am much better today.  Unfortunately when I get stressed, my back sometimes plays up.  At least when it is stress, it get better as soon as I relax and get rest!
today's ATC is a bit imperfect.
I used a bit too much gel with my transfer and it bled into the fabric a bit, oops.
Cotton cat theme fabric, transparency transfer, wooden cat shaped button, perle thread.  This reminds me of my cat, who is afraid of anything, including a wisp of air and especially, the main culprit,
Thumper, the bunny, who chases her around the house! (The cat has learned to move around the house from one high place to another, lol)

Now on to some stuff.  I said yesterday that Tony had pulled some electrical stuff apart for me.  I am collecting little bits to make some (very) mixed media collages.
Here is my desk this morning!!!
This deconstructing of things to use them is a very messy business, perhaps it should be called messy media in my case instead of mixed media
Here are a few of the items which I have collected and intend to use on these pieces.
These are the chips out of computers.  originally, I just wanted to decorate the square and rectangular tops as central motifs, but when they came out I turned them over and there were all these tiny pins, which made me think of weaving patterns with thread on them (or wire)
These things are all called heat sinks.  I suppose they are to stop things getting to hot when the electricity goes through.  But I love the shapes and patterns on them.  Colour is not really an issue as the colours you see here are just skin deep and I can make them any colour I want, but I really love the pink tree shaped one!
On the left are two reflective disks from cd rom drives.  I can't wait to stitch them down.  The circles at the top right are faces from computers fans.  and the beautiful coils at the bottom were in the battery compartment of an old tape player.  I love spirals.
I have a big collection of these fan blades.  I think they will fit in very well in a garden collage after a bit of painting and embellishing.
Now, these, were some very conservative heat sinks which I almost didn't keep, but I decided the holes might be useful for adding interesting stitching to.
These are some of my favourite bits.  They are sets of coils from motors and fans and are like little flowers with beautiful metallic petals.  They are all different sizes and numbers of spokes and colours.  The two silver things were holding one of the coils in place, and I liked them, too.
Last, but not least, this is my pride and joy and will be the centrepiece in a collage one day.  It is a set of coils, like the ones just above, but it is from an old 5 and a 1/4  floppy disk drive (think 1980 type computers!)  I hate to think how many of these drives I have turfed over the years!

Anyway, you can see what madness my husband and I get up to when we work together, can't you?  I don't know whether I'm a bad influence on him, or he is a bad influence on me, but we certainly get up to no good with old junk.  I do love making something from stuff that is junk to any other house in town, lol.

now that I have got all that madness off my chest, will we get back to "normal" stuff tomorrow? - you will have to see.

Remember, one person's trash is another person's treasure, or perhaps should we say anyone's trash is an artist's treasure?