Creating Displays for Junk Mail Jewelry

Over the past couple of days I've been working on some ways to display my products for the upcoming Craftstravaganza this April in St. Paul. For jewelry I decided to use this piece of drift wood. I originally picked up this piece of wood on the shore of Lake Erie back when we were living in Ohio for my iguana's habitat! It traveled with us on our move to Minnesota where it lived near the pond/fountain in our back yard for over 4 years. I have now turned it into a jewelry rack by drilling small holes in it and inserting little wooden dowels as hooks. Not too bad for it's third life after death!

Wine Cork Bulletin Board

I finally got around to making a cool bulletin board this week with my huge stash of wine corks. I still need to figure out an edge treatment to finish it off, but otherwise it is pretty close to done! I used some scraps of board that were left over from a previous project, and then glued each cork using some Titebond III wood glue which really seems to hold very strong! I'd love to make these cork boards available on my Junk Mail Gems page of other recycled stuff some time in the future!

Happy 2 month birthday! And, thrift store finds

My little buddy Sammy turned 2 months old today! :-) What does this have to do with Junk Mail Gems or recycling, you say? Well, besides the fact that he is the son of the artist, this gives me the opportunity to point out that those of you with babies may know that garage sale-ing and thrift stores are a great way to save money and re-use clothing and other items. Babies grow out of stuff so fast that they look like new, and I often find brand new clothing with the tags still on them at garage sales! I sometimes like to plan an occasional thrift store visit to get in my garage sale fix in the middle of winter in Minnesota. Here are just a few of the adorable things in little Sammy's closet that I found this winter, and it's not hard to find name brand stuff either!

Cassette Tape Wallets & VHS tape purses

Check out these awesome cassette tape wallets, passed on to me by my sister...so cool! I'm sure when my little boy grows up he'll say, "what's a cassette tape?!" Kinda like my generation and 8-tracks...but cool to see this great way to re-use outdated technology.

I was thinking this could reside inside of a VHS tape purse so I did some searching online. I thought I might find one similar in design, like something that uses the plastic housing of the tape. But, here's a purse that is actually crocheted out of the VHS tape itself. You can even get instructions to make your own!



Looking for more cool recycled wallets? Check out my junk mail wallets! :-) Hopefully I'll have some purses soon too!

Bread Bag Tags...burning a hole in my drawer!

Ever stop to notice those little pieces of plastic that hold your bread bag shut? Well, probably not, but those are the crazy things I notice during my day-to-day activities like making some morning toast. I have recently started collecting these clips in hopes of finding something creative to do with them. I've noticed in my very small collection already that there are many colors and shapes, and they make quite an interesting arrangement! I did a little Google-ing to find out what other people are doing with these often unnoticed and cast-away little gems...

Apparently there are some other people out there who found a pile of bag clips artistic...Check out this photo on flickr of someone's collection of bag clips!

Check out this link for 10 ways to re-use those bread bag clips.

Now this guy is a serious collector!

And here are some very cool bread bag tag earrings, and a very cool necklace!

Well, whenever I do come up with something to make out of these, I'll be sure to post it!

Design Sponge holding DIY Contest

If you're a creative, resourceful person like me, you might like to know that one of my favorite blogs, Design Sponge, is holding a DIY contest with some pretty nice prize money to be won!

Food Wrapper Dress

One of my design business partners, Bart, recently sent me a link to this cool dress made entirely of food wrappers from the Make Magazine blog! Pretty cool...makes me want to expand my junk mail fashion accessories to fashion itself!