News — creative reuse

In case you missed it, I braved the 35 mph wind gusts and vended at the second annual Montclair's Earth Fest on South Park Street last Sunday. I spent the weeks leading up to the event sorting the donations of arts and crafts supplies I had collected over the past year. I had so much more than I realized! I had to make tough choices about what to bring and what to leave behind. And as the day approached, and I saw that the weather was going to be my least favorite, windy, I put a lot of preparation into...

I'm returning to Montclair's Earth Fest this Sunday, April 27th! For the second year in a row I'll be promoting the Montclair Creative Reuse Project! I'll have art-related supplies available at "Pay What You Can" prices and I'll be collecting donations of materials! Read on for more info... Last year was a great success and I'm excited to bring a new, bigger selection of art-related supplies to South Park Street from 12pm to 4pm. We've received so many wonderful donations and I'm excited to share these materials with folks and inspire them to be sustainably creative! Some of the items...

The Montclair Creative Reuse Project has been the recipient of so many wonderful materials donations recently! I'm very grateful to all the generous people who have reached out to me through the contact page on my website and made the effort to bring me their donations of craft supplies! They will be made available at the next pop-up event and on the Shop MCRP page.  Just some of the recent materials donations I've received for MCRP! Buttons, beads, crochet hooks, yarn, acrylic paints, a case of disposable culture tubes... ...a paper drill for bookmaking, a small sewing machine, sidewalk chalk, a...

Last Saturday I had a blast at the Charles H Bullock Elementary School Eco Fair and Repair Cafe promoting the Montclair Creative Reuse Project and making books from repurposed papers with the kids. It's a fun demo that I've done before. I brought materials to make mini books including a variety of papers, book cover materials like file folders in different colors, and supplies to decorate them like stickers, colored pencils, markers, and the most popular item, mini paper punches. All these materials came from my Creative Reuse Project stash!  The weather was great, the wind only sent us running after papers...

This year I'm committed to creating intentional, quality, down time for myself. Back in January I started browsing crafty workshops and landed on an interesting 2-day class at Peters Valley called Zero Waste Backstrap Weaving. That had my name written all over it! I was a weaving and textile design major in college but haven't done any weaving since 1988. That was also the year when I first visited Peters Valley, located in the Delaware Water Gap National Recreation Area in northwest NJ. A friend from my program was apprenticing at Peters Valley that summer and I went there to...