We’re All Ears May Challenge

The challenge this month is all about trash transformed, taking something otherwise neglected, forgotten or discarded and making it into something of beauty, substance and ingenuity. “There is a fine line between trash and treasure” and this challenge is all about walking that line. We were given this lovely collage of transformed treasures for inspiration

I must confess that recycling items into art is something that has intrigued me for a long time. I’ve actually been collecting interesting tin containers, old watch parts and broken down electronic parts to experiment with, but never took that first step until now.

All cut apart, prepped and waiting for a decent disc cutter, there were several tin containers sitting in my stash. I took advantage of a sale earlier this year and bought a Pepe disc cutter package with a 14 hole disc cutter, sized from 1/8” up to 1”, urethane pad, holding base and 8 centre punches for the larger disc holes. So excited! It sure beats the cheap newbie punch I bought several years ago

I put the new disc cutter to good use and made these earrings

All of the red circles came from a Christmas tin. The red colour is not solid, shifting and changing shades throughout the tin

 

Red Planet

I added clear faceted glass rondelles to these 1” discs and used silver plated wire and leverback ear wires

Triple Decked

For these earrings 3 sizes of tin discs were put together with silver plated ear hoops and oval jump rings. The pretty light mint discs came from a tin covered in cheerful dots which I pulled in along the edges. The earrings hang just over 2 1/2”

Garden Fruit

Some small tea tins are the source of the discs for these earrings. There are many fruit and leaves on the tins. It will be a lot of fun playing with them. For the earrings I added red glass faceted beads and used silver plated wire and leverback ear wires again

Optical

The final pair use 4 different sizes of discs from the red tin. I simply reversed the smallest and 2^nd largest discs to the silver back so that there would be contrast and more depth. To make these discs I selected the best area on the tin, tightened down the disc puncher, marked the hole location with the centre punches then punched the discs themselves out. Some minor sanding of all edges, completion of the centre holes and doming came next. The bright and cheery yellow bead is a handmade lampwork glass headpin on a copper wire made by Samantha Capeling. The copper wire was used to form the loop and the trailing curl. All I had to do after was add the copper leverback ear wires

I hope you enjoyed seeing the earrings. They are available in my shop now

Do go to the reveal and see what everyone else made. Thanks for stopping by and have a great day