Tuesday, June 1, 2010

RECYCLING

 Many contemporary artists work with recycled material and produce really stunning items.  
I decided  to try this out on a small scale by myself. I heard that cut pieces of plastic bags can be fused together with heat, applied with a dry iron - and yes, it works very nicely! Baking paper has to be used to protect the iron. There is almost no limit of what can be done. First thing of course would be to collect plastic bags in all kind of different colors. Then they can be cut up in every imaginable shape and fused into a collage like sheet. It can be sewn to fabric, to create bags, pouches, purses, album covers and a lot more. I did not pursue this much further, but the potential certainly is immense. I fused some practice pieces and used them with canvas fabric to make two lovely pouches embellished with buttons.
 After returning from a vacation to London, I created a photo album cover from the saved plastic bags we got there, and some of the places we visited, including the famous shopping mall of course, can be seen after the pieces have been fused together and quilted onto fabric.
  Go ahead, it is fun and easy!!

4 comments:

Jill said...

Fantastic! And I'm so happy to find that I'm not the only crazy person who saves bags from trips abroad. For some reason, they are precious to me, I can't explain it. What a clever bunny you are to use them in collage form. Brilliant!

Dawn of LaTouchables said...

Yael--now you have me rummaging through the plastic bags looking for something to cut up! They are very beautiful!

Pesky Cat Designs said...

These are all amazing!! What great ideas for recycling.

Tanja said...

This is a technique I never heard about. It is very interesting and if I would have been aware of it before, I would have kept for you all the beautiful plastic bags I brought from Finland. Most of them had very interesting graphics on it, some of them with typical finish ornaments.