There are a number of ways to help reduce the amount of advertising circulars, fliers, in-mail supplements, and throw-aways that end up in the Land Fills via your mailbox. If you're absolutely sick of them all showing up in your snail mail box, by all means get active and head over to The Privacy Rights Clearing House, or Ecofuture and learn how to get off of all the lists that you possibly can.

We've done that at home in Thorne's World, but we still receive an inordinate amount of junk because our contracted mail carrier simply can't be bothered to change her routine enough to skip stuffing our box.

We compost most of the non glossy papers (after using them to line the bottoms of 6 large parrot cages), but the parrots don't like the glossy papers any more than I like the idea of my birds chewing on them, so the glossies just kept stacking up!

One frustrating day the stack fell to the floor and I noticed the array of color, the variety of type, the words and images and a light bulb went off in my head (a compact fluorescent, of course!) I thought: Collage! Mosaic! Scrapbooking! Art Journaling! Suddenly I had a use for all of my long saved magazines, and old calendars full of luscious images and colors as well!

A word of caution: If you use junk mail for scrap booking, or art journaling make sure you seal it, because it is NOT archival quality and will degrade over time and ruin your projects.

It's as simple as cutting (or tearing for interesting texture) your junk into squares or other shapes.

I separate them into little piles of similar color, or images so I can see at a glance what I have to work with. Can't you already see something waiting to be born in those tiny squares of color? Do the words and fonts you've snipped speak to you?

You can get as involved and planned out as you like, sketch your image on your base... or just dig right in laying color and shape and image down as it calls to you (my usual preferred method).

I generally use a 3:1 glue to water ratio of an eco friendly white glue to make and seal my paper collage and mosaic art.

This is a collage I made on one of about 50 plastic bathing suit displays that I rescued from a Retail store.They were tossed out and were destined for the land fill.

This can be a great crafting and eco lesson project for home schoolers and public educators as well!

Last year I discovered that I was in very good company with my recyled junk mail mosaics and collage, when I came upon the art of S. A. Schimmel. Schimmel works with business cards, old greeting cards, menus, junk mail postcards, cruise itineraries and paint. In Schimmel's own words her pieces portray “Advertising images married with advertising’s images.”

Across the Universe copyright SC Schimmel

 

As an artist she stands as a fine example to all of us to make beauty and art worth saving and preserving out of the "throw away" remnants of our consumer driven society.

What will you create?