Day 201:  I added on to the structure I was making out of little boxes.  I made it big enough to cover my whole bedroom window. 

Day 202: I made a little rolled paper circle out of magazine paper.  I want to make it into a ring, but this is as far as I got.

Day 203: When I was taking pictures of the things I've made this week, I couldn't remember what I made this day.  I thought maybe I had missed a day, but as soon as I got here to the coffee shop, I remembered.  Thank goodness.  But I do not have a photo yet.

Day 204: I made a cardboard sculpture out of different sized circles that have slits in them to hold them together.  I especially like the circle that has print on it.

Day 205: My friend R.A.L. brought these salt tubs into the store where I work for me to make something out of.  I liked the idea of making something fairly simple that still showed what they looked like originally, and I am always in need of little storage spaces.  I like that I have recurring themes in a lot of my work.  Cylinders and circles have pretty much taken over my home.

Day 196:  I bought an inexpensive record at a thrift store so that I could try this.  This was a very simple project in some ways.  It only takes a few minutes in your oven for the record to melt.  Once it is melted, and you take it out of the oven and try to shape it, it starts to harden fast.  So the tricky part is trying to make it a uniform shape, which I wasn't really able to do, but maybe if I try it a few more times.  I like my bowl though.  I have to admit I haven't listened to much Robert Palmer (just grabbed a random record from the bunch), but I like the title "Some People Can do What They Like."

Day 197: I decorated the cover of the black book I created a few weeks ago.  I happen to really like the long blue wig. 

Day 198:  I decorated a heart cut out from the cover of a magazine with strips of magazine pages. 

Day 199:  I decorated another heart, this time with circles.  I guess I'm getting a head start on Valentines day.  I love the side with the tree with the purple leaves and circles of snow and grass.

Day 200!!!!!!  I worked a ton on my sculpture today, which is going into an art show this coming weekend.  I stayed up till two in the morning.  Thank goodness I had the day off the next day.  It has just a few more spaces that need filling in. I'm really happy I've made it to day 200!

 

Day 192:  I took the three paper plates I had drawn on and glued them all together, then covered them with magazine strips.  So now I have a sturdy decorative plate.  It is a little lopsided, but I'm fond of it anyhow, and it seems more functional and interesting than the original series of plates.

Day 193: I covered a piece of mat board with magazine strips to make a frame for a funny postcard that I found at a thrift store.  (Actually it kind of scares me).

Day 194: I made a heart out of large strips of magazine paper.  (If you are wondering why so much magzine paper lately... At the store where I work, we make little bags out of magazine pages, and I have recently been saving the scraps.)

Day 195: A friend of mine gave me a bunch of these emergency number fridge magnets.  I turned one of them into a frame, by cutting out the middle, painting it with black acrylic paint, and then painting it with shiny glitter paint.

Day 186:  Using my origami book once again (and the physics book), I made a lily.

Day 187:  Another project with the physics book, but what it is exactly, I cannot say.  I used a technique that I remember learning at school when I was younger, where you fold two ends of a strip of paper over and over one another.  I thought it would be cool to make a really long one and make a sculpture out of it.  Turns out, my energy to keep adding on fizzled out and I was left with a small doodad.  I like it though and envision a larger version of it hanging from a ceiling somewhere.

Day 188:  I made a different version of the zipper flower and sewed it onto a bracelet made out of zippers.  This is probably my favorite thing that I ever made out of zippers. 

Day 189:  I was trying to make a bag out of strings, a bag that could perhaps serve as a produce bag, but it turned out to be a mess of knots. 

Day 190: I tried again to use the strings to make something, nothing particularly interesting, just a simple six strand braid. 

Day 191: Another origami project, this one made from a catalog.  It's somewhat interesting to me, but I discovered that using bigger squares for these origami structures doesn't work as well. 

Day 181 and 182:  I made another project from the origami book.  This was made up of 30 pieces that were exactly the same and then connected together. 

Day 183:   I made it to the halfway point!  This is both exciting and discouraging.  I know now that as I complete a project every day that I will have done more than I have left to do.  Yet, I also feel like I have been doing this for forever and that to keep on as long as I have been will be quite a challenge.   The happy feelings surpass any discouragement I feel, so today I drew a happy face.  I ordered some food today and it was served on several layered plates, so instead of throwing them away decided to draw on them.

Day 184:  Another paper plate drawing:

Day 185: and yet another... (all from the same meal).  Don't really know what good they are now that I have them, but it was fun to use them for my little sketches, even if they do end up being fire starters this winter!

Day 177: I turned my bottle cap art into magnets.

Day 178:  I worked on my sculpture again, cutiing lids in half to fit into smaller spaces, and then filling up the even smaller spaces with straws.  My hope is that no cardboard will end up showing through at all, and it will just be a chaotic burst of plastic.  It is turning out to be all that I had hoped it would.

Day 179:  I got a new book that shows how to make some of the complex origami structures that I've been scouring the web for instructions for (unsuccessfully). They are the ones that are made up of a bunch of indentical units that are tucked into each other.  I love the book, but they are indeed complex.  The first one I tried I couldn't quite get it, but I like the mistake I made.  (I am still using pieces of the physics book I destroyed.)

Day 180:  I tried again to make the same one as yesterday, and I figured it out.  I was way off track the first time!  I love this and can't wait to make more.

Day 175:  I created a sphere out of cardboard and brown packing paper, in hopes of having a structure to go underneath the lids.  (As mentioned in my last post).

Day 176: I spent nine hours this day gluing lids all over the cardboard sphere.  Part of why it took so long was that I scratched each lid with a razor blade knife to create a more adhesive surface.  I also glued smaller lids inside the bigger lids (and tore apart the half sphere I made before and all the glue stuck to those lids).  I am lucky that my daughter is spending time with her grandma in Colorado, and that both of my friends that I had planned on spending time with this day canceled on me.  I really wanted to make this in time to photograph it and submit it to a recycled art show here in Taos.  I got it in at the very last possible moment, but it wouldn't have been possible if I didn't spend an entire day with it!  I have just a few more additions I want to make. 

Day 172:  There is a coffee shop here in Taos called Elevation, that has some of the best coffe in Taos, not so much because of the particular bean, but because they are masters of the espresso machine.  So they were already my heros really, crazy about coffee as I am, but I found out recently that they have been saving lids off of milk jugs, cream, honey, juice, etc.  They had two large tubs of them, and being "recycle girl," of course I wanted to take those babies home.  So my project for today was to create and photograph a sea of lids in my bathtub.  I had that "this is so crazy I'm cracking up over it" kind of moment as I was taking these pictures, because really, I have never seen so many lids in my life.  Isn't it odd that I want and love them?

Day 173:  I had this idea in my head for using my lids, I wanted to make a sphere, with little lids glued inside larger lids.  This was my first attempt, trying to sew them together.  It was working okay, but it was just too much work, so I gave up on this method.

Day 174:  My second attempt at creating the sphere.  I love how this was turning out, problem is, the hot glue I was using to hold it all together wasn't strong enough, and as I was picking it up and trying to move it, it started coming apart.  Rats.

Day 166:  I decorated another lid.   This one is very simple, but I have to admit that when making something every day, some projects simply must be simple.  (And some sentences are surely sometimes tongue twisters.)  I like this one because I so often feel like a busy bee, always buzzing around or building beautiful things.  This is a Dr. Seuss illustration, whose crazy rhyming stories I've always loved.

Day 167 and 168: I worked on my receipt bowl once again, and this time I think it feels complete.  I added 115 more receipts, for a total of 335.  This time almost all of my receipts came from one person, my friend Nicole, who had several years of receipts saved up. I didn't even use up all of them. It is interesting the things receipts reveal about a person.    

Day 169:  I took another bunch of little boxes and added to what I made on Day 146.  Since I have been doing recycled projects every day, nothing is sweeter than when someone thinks of me and holds onto some recycled materials for me.  It makes me feel so loved.  So, thank you Sara, for saving the boxes for me!  The insides of these were white, whereas the ones before were brown, which makes really adds to the design. 

Day 170: I took a children's book and painted it black.  I'm not quite sure where I'm going with this.  I want to add to it more, either covering it up with collages, or somehow turning it into an art piece.  For now, it is just a black book. 

Day 171: I made another paper rose, using paper from the physics book. I found a pattern online that I like a lot for a simple, but beautiful rose.  I feel like I could sit down and make a whole bouquet of these, whereas the rose I made earlier was extremely complicated.  Here is a link for where I found the directions.  Try it out!  stacycohen.blogspot.com/2010/08/prima-layout-and-paper-rose-flower.html