Making Mixed-Media With Free Stuff

Here's my story of making something out of free stuff. All of which is from the last time I visited FabMo. I hadn't gotten around to putting it all away, so I thought I'd see what I could make by combining as much of it as I could. These painted wood pieces were interesting colors to start with, and I liked the size. But, the question came up immediately as I considered using these. How will I either cover up or utilize the hole drilled in such a strange place?

This ring of journal cover samples was irresistible, the shape, the colors, the textures. Unfortunately there is printing covering a lot of the surface, and the reverse side is uninteresting.

Several of these neutral wovens were appealing, some are wool, some linen and/or cotton. I plan to use them in dyeing and painting somehow. But one of them made it into this project uncolored.

I chose these tiles because of how they felt when I touched them in the bin of tile samples. They also reminded me of buttons.

First I glued down three of the tile buttons along one edge. That solved the hole in the wrong place problem!

Next I glued down some of the mesh-looking fabric, I made sure it was very frayed just because I like how that looks.

I found a sentence I liked out of a book and glued it to one of the journal cover sample shapes. Deciding which end is up was a little hard.

Here's how all three ended up once I was done.

I decided there needed to be one other fabric involved, so I chose this gold/red woven silk/rayon. I wanted to have mostly the same materials on each one, but with enough of a difference to make it interesting. The journal cover sample shape and size was not too easy to work with compared with the shape and size of the wood piece. So I ended up cutting them up for the other two pieces. I'm not sure that I like how the words look on this one compared to the other two. I may cover them up like this one below:

I photographed these on a background of the red/gold fabric, just because I liked how the colors all looked together.

So there's my story of making something new out of free stuff. These three are all going to hang together on my wall just as soon as I nail some hangers onto the back of them.