It's bEARTHday

 

Hello everyone.  You may call me Dr. E., Queen of Free.  I was born on Earth Day, which makes me all the more inspired to find free or nearly free items I can recycle. 

In case you have lived under a rock most of your life and have never heard of Earth Day, the first person to propose, create, and found it was John McConnell.  Originally, the date of the first Earth Day was to be the first day of spring, March 21, 1970.  However, many of us know that Gaylord Nelson, the senator and environmentalist from Wisconsin is considered to be the founder of Earth Day.  Originally scheduled to be a "teach in," it became so much more.  The date was set for April 22, 1970 and Earth Day is now celebrated on that same day every year.  Today Earth Day is 51 years young.

The first Earth Day and the next 20 years were focused in the states.  However, in 1990, Earth Day went International.  Over 100 million people in 192 countries celebrated Earth Day in 2020.  Being in lockdown may have helped the number of people who participated online.

We were going gangbusters until 2017, where many of the wonderful environmental and other acts that were in effect for many years, and others that were created by the Obama administration, were removed due to Trump's rule reversals.

You can see what devastation to our earth these reversals have caused.  If you would like to read more about each of these rules reversals, each is discussed in this recently updated article in the New York Times.  According to the article and a staff attorney at Harvard’s Environmental and Energy Law Program:

This (previous) administration is leaving a truly unprecedented legacy.

I was delighted to read that the Biden administration is holding a global climate summit today.

Every year I try to create art that I take from trash to treasure.  Here are a few I've created in the past.

2020:

I have this massive amount of 12 X 2 inches (30,48 X 5,08 centimeters) wood that I cut to varying lengths, mostly close to 12 inches each.  I also have a lot of old silk flowers that I've taken to graves I've decorated in the past.  The button was from my stash and the clock hands from a deconstructed clock.  The paint came from the Household Hazardous Waste Swap and Shop, where it was free.  The only things new were the doily and the glue I used to apply the various parts to the wood.

2019:

I named this Ticket to Ride.  I started with a sheet of cardboard from a cracker box.  To it I added a map of part of the states.  Over that, I added an acetate overlay from an area in Russia.  I found an entire box of these acetates at the curb in another town I was visiting at the time.  They were marked free.  Since I am always looking for ways to enhance my 7-Continents journal, I couldn't pass them up.  The tickets came from my stash of old or gifted goodies.  The only new item was the three paper doll children.

This started out as mostly white, used dryer sheets.  I colored the dryer sheets using fluid acrylics.  I dyed some lace lavender for contrast.  There was also part of an old lacy tablecloth I cut up after I immersion dyed it years ago.  I cut the image holder by hand from stained leather.  I was going for the darkest color of the dryer sheets when I stained the leather.  The image, the Last Supper, was from a book I found in my neighbor's trash.  I added the zipper pull for decorative purposes.  I sewed the various layers together using variegated thread.  I added the fancy fiber and fed the quiltlet through a stick from my yard.

2018:

I created this page in an old gifted calendar.  I called it Point the Way.  I did a lot of sewing on this page.  I also threw as many things as I could find on this page in an attempt to get rid of a few of my excess scraps.

A companion piece that sat next to the previous journal page, I called this one Back Story.  It has even more disparate pieces that were cluttering my scrap basket.  More sewing on this one, too.

What do you do when you have lots of old lids, some old telephone wire, and a rusty clothes hanger?  You make wind chimes.  It's hard to see the words I etched onto the lids from this photo, but the words are easily seen if you are in front of the wind chimes.  The words read: Wash, Rinse, Dry, Fold, Repeat.  That's why this wind chime is sitting on my clothes line.

I altered the following keys

and turned them into brooches.

2017:

 

This is a small collage I created from scraps and leftovers.  The base is a cracker box.  To that I added a map of Florida, a gifted die cut of the states, and a faux cloisonné heart with a peace sign inside it.

I dug this piece of styrofoam out of my friend Sally's recycle bin.  I had some leftover fun foam, so I created a chevron stamp.  Once I created it, I realized white glue was not the best glue for the project and I applied E6000 to the fun foam chevron pieces and reassembled the stamp.

Everything in this entry is recycled or repurposed.  I named it Can You Hear Me Now?  It started with one half of an old Reader's Digest Condensed book cover.  To that I added the gifted angel tissue paper.  I disassembled an old phone and used the board and amplifier.  I created the little piece hanging off the bottom by finding several green beads from my stash and running a piece of copper wire through them.  I added a few green stars along the middle of the "mother" board and added more beads along the top.  I computer generated the words and added them to the assemblage.  Finally, I used deconstructed telephone wire and beads from my stash to construct the hanger.

In an attempt to find ways to use wire hangers I'd been given, I tied two together, forming a cage in the process.  The rope came from my neighbor who purchased some wood that had been tied with the rope.  The branch came from my yard.  I purchased the bird in the late 1980s during a trip to California.  The plate had been one of the 24 from my grandmother's Christmas dishes.  It was chipped and couldn't be used anyway. 

2016:

I recycled this mint tin by recycling some rusted paper and cheesecloth.  The child was printed by accident, so since I already had it, I fussy cut it and added it to the tin.

I recycled a spring from a "dead" clothes pin and inserted a bead I made using polymer clay.  I inserted the assembly in a portion of used chain.

I colored some key heads using some old glitter paint I found in my stash.

I dipped a second set of keys in encaustic wax after failing to fully appreciate encaustics.

I used old nail polish (I don't polish my nails) to mark a few more of these.

2015:

Some of you were here yesterday when you saw my failed shrink plastic experiment.

I fared much better in 2015.

I even remembered to use the correct ink then, too.

It was also the first year I started making brooches out of keys.

 

I turned a few keys into hooks,

 

and I even used my metal stamps to add a few words of wisdom to some of them.  From left: BE, OK, FUN, JOY.  Some don't work well for adding words.

 

As if bending keys wasn't enough to severely damage my hands, I turned spoons into necklace potentials, too.

And one final cutlery project was when I revamped my Welcome wind chimes.  The original chimes were either missing or used in other projects.  I restrung the hangers and beaded cutlery so I didn't have to drill holes in each piece.

Please ignore the problems I'm having trying to left justify these final few photos.  No matter what I try, nothing works.  

Now for one final piece today.  I'm from an age where you went into a grocery store and the baggers asked

"Do you want Paper or Plastic?"  Last year in March my bank updated their ATMs and sent everyone new cards.  I didn't go to my bank until mid-December when I needed money to pay my property taxes.  That's when I learned my card wouldn't work in the new ATM.  Because I had waited more than three months to activate it, the bank cancelled it.  That meant I needed a new one.

The top one is my cancelled card.  It has the words Dr. Elizabeth and my last name, which I will NEVER, EVER allow on my blog.  Since some people (and I'm one of them) can read backwards, I covered my last name with paper I glued in place.

The bottom two are cards that were never activated, but sent to my residence, since my friend Joseph Peck kept his Panhead Music Production business at my address.

While I was there, the person waiting on me was putting all these bands that cover various dollar amounts away.  I asked what they did with them, and the teller told me they sent them to the recycle bin.  Never afraid to ask for art fodder, the teller gave me a ton of these bands.  

Sadly, there were only two $2000.00 tags, but that was enough to create this final entry.

That's when the idea for this entry became reality and Paper or Plastic was born.

I loved how there was a bit of texture in this very flat journal page.

For this page, I started by spritzing some of my handmade shimmering mists on 90 lb. watercolor paper.  Once the paper was dry, I assembled the money bands and credit cards on the page.  Finally, I wrote the sentiment using a blue felt tip pen.  Because I was inspired to recycle these cards and money bands, I'm also joining Erika, aka BioArtGal and Chris, aka Pearshapedcrafting our hosts this month at Art Journal Journey. 

Thanks for sticking around while I shared some of the things I've made during my previous bEARTHday events.  Tomorrow I'll share what plastic can and cannot be recycled in the states.  I thought this post was long enough as it was.  Again, I am SO grateful you stuck with me through these 22 days of recycling.  Just because it's Earth Day, doesn't mean we shouldn't be doing these same things every day.