Weekend Watch: Tinkering and Stop Motion with Dina Amin
A young Egyptian product designer deconstructs and stop-motion animates her tinkering for entertainment, inspiration, and education.
creative reuse
7 Ways to Upcycle Your Stockpile of Plastic Bags
If the plastic bag you use to hold all your other plastic bags is getting full, here are 7 ways to upcycle them.
Michael Salter’s Styrobot Sculptures
Sick of throwing out boxes full of useless, exotically-shaped, styrofoam packing materials? You could always take a leaf from artist Michael Salter’s book and construct a massive meditating robot sculpture from left-over styrofoam, which he calls styrobots.
Kickstart This: Recycled Fire Hose Mats
Just in time to coincide with our “Danger” issue hitting the stands, our Maker-in-Chief Sherry Huss came across this wonderful Kickstarter for household mats made from recycled fire hoses. This is your chance to pick up beautifully-designed product that embraces reuse and honors the importance of firefighters.
Toys Made From Salvaged Flip-flops in Kenya
These whimsical toy animals are the work of the Ocean Sole flip-flop recycling company in Nairobi. The toys they make are created from old flip-flops and other debris that has washed up on the beaches in Kenya.
Hard Drive Technojunk Enterprise Sculpt
From Etsy seller Daniel Shankalonian comes this tasty junk art delicacy. “Created entirely from a hard drive, a laptop keyboard, and various parts from a dead motherboard…stand is included, also made out of hard drive parts and broken headphones.”
Paper Plate Mandala
As a young sculptor fresh from art school, Wendy Brackman struggled with the problem of “selling out.” In the video, above, she talks about her decision to become a party entertainer. Her act involves spontaneous sculpture of weird party hats cut by hand, from paper plates, using scissors, and joined together with staples. That was it. In need of a broader color palette, she began painting the plates with acrylic house paint before cutting them up, and as her act developed and began to take off, eventually graduated to custom-printed and die-cut cardstock blanks, instead of plates. Eventually…
