craftgrrl | New upcycled crafts! (Reply)

The idea of upcycling is, you take something that would otherwise be trash/recyclable and you turn it into something useful! Etsy's running a contest for upcycled crafts, and these were my two entries!

This typewriter was left in our garage by a previous tenant with no ribbon, broken keys and a cracked case. Since I already have a working typewriter, we thought this one would be permanent decoration until the contest gave me the idea to refurbish it. I dismantled parts of the "inside" of the typewriter: took off the plastic piece that once covered the stamps and disabled the spring lock on the paper roller.

Then, I constructed the 'bins' of the organizer by collaging pieces of cardboard from the recycling bin with pages from my 'word a day' 2006 calender and glueing them into boxes. The front box is 10 inches long (left to right), 1.5 inches wide (back to front) and 2 inches deep. The smaller center box is 5.5 inches long, 2.5 inches wide and 3 inches deep. In the back, I also collaged a piece of 8x11 inch cardboard with a small foot (held in place by the paper grip on the roller) for a paper stand. This is used for typing up something handwritten--you can rest papers or a notebook on this to see it better. As you can see in the fourth picture, there are two small, round metal bins on either side of the center bin, which were the original spots for the spools of ink ribbon, which are the perfect size for tacks or paper clips. The entire typewriter is about 12x12 inches at its largest points, and weighs about 15 pounds.

I got the idea when thinking about making a coffee table book out of mixed media collages. It occured to me that you usually see coffee table books full of photography and other visual arts; if they include writing at all, it's a small caption or a few page essay in the front. So I decided the best thing to do was create a coffee table book that featured writing--not neccesarily as something meant to be read, but as an art, as pages full of words, notes, scribbles and imagery. So I did.

The book is made of cardboard collaged with bits and pieces of my writing and query letters (entirely my own, so there is no copyright infringement) taken entirely from my recycle bin. As in, drafts of pieces that I edited then got rid of, original outlines and notes for pieces and multiple copies--nothing I printed out specifically for this project, so it is entirely recycled paper. The front and back covers have several small metal embellishments--they are bits of the inside of a dismantled unworking typewriter, which I dismantled for my other upcycling entry!