From 'Trash to Treasure' Charm Swap

This is the current charm swap over on Paper Digital Art and Images By Kim.

Kim sent all participants a bulging bag full of 'trinkets and trash, baubles, blobs and broken bits' and the idea being to create ten charms using at least one item from the bag for each charm.  Each participant will receive ten different charms back in return.

What fun it was opening the bag of 'trash' and going through it all - then reality struck and I thought how could I possibly make anything from all that lot!  Thank goodness though it was an open theme and Kim had also suggested considering 'window decorations, ornament hangy things and collage creations for artists to use to embellish other projects'.

I liked the idea of window decorations and hangy things as that opened the field quite a bit with regards to size.  So here's a picture of all ten of my finished 'charms'.  They are quite a mix of different things really. 


The two largest pieces are definitely hangy things rather than charms.  They look like a couple of Goddesses to me, and of course I had to get a couple of faces in there somewhere didn't I!

Well Valentine's day may have been and gone for this year, but as there were some hearts in my bag of trash here's what I made with them.

Finally I used some game pieces, which were from my own stash.  In the bag were some cute little nautical charms which I attached to the bottom of Mah Jong tiles.  I uses some postage stamps with ships on to cover the tiles.  The middle piece is a bamboo domino tile (again from my own stash) - I attached the star (from the trash bag) and covered the tile with another postage stamp which I received recently from Canada celebrating the Chinese year of the rat.  This is my favourite of them all.  I am after all a rat myself (in Chinese years I mean obviously - LOL)

This really was much more of a challenge than I had anticipated and although I'm not entirely satisfied with all of the charms, at least I got the job done!  Phew! 

Now I need to start thinking of the next challenge on Kim's site - more row houses to the theme of 'in a colorful neighborhood' a real Spring theme, and the sun is shining today, so that's a good start!