A Second Collective Look

This week, I need to beg your forgiveness as I am recycling a post from a couple years ago. There’s been a small avalanche of family emergencies — nothing life-threatening — and I need to head out to Colorado and Kansas for a couple of weeks. I’ve been unable to put something together for the blog with all the distractions, but I’ve been thinking about this idea of collections again. It seems a lot of us were doing it a bit of exploring last year, which tends to result in lots of unused bits and pieces. So, this might be a useful reminder of things you can do with those bits and bobs.

Do you have a bin or box of pieces and parts of your handiwork yet unfinished but which you are too in love with toss? If you regularly create, I can’t imagine that you don’t. But what exactly do we do with these pieces? Do we hold on to them, hoping that they will be just the thing needed someday or do we toss them?

It can be quite the dilemma, one that even Marie Kondo can’t easily help with because, hey, these do spark joy for us! We see value in them, in that they represent our creativity and what we can accomplish. But do such little jewels of our work belong in a bin where we don’t get to admire them?

I’ve been thinking about this question for a while and came up with a few solutions of my own. If you have a copy of Polymer Journeys 2019, you can see, in the very last entry, my contribution, which is a display case of small exploratory items for which I had no particular use in mind when created them. I created them without thinking, “This is going to be a pendant,” or “This is going to be a set of earrings,” or “This is going to decorate a vessel.” I just made them to see what the material would do, most of which I liked, and they all represented a little exploratory learning experience.

I had already been tying bits onto ribbons and hanging them off the edge of my studio corkboard as little festive decorations. That doesn’t work for pieces that only had one viewing angle though as they would twist around on the ribbons, so I was still in search of other options.

Then I was out talking to the butterflies in my backyard (Yeah, I talk to the creatures in my yard,) and remembering how I used to catch and collect them in shadow boxes as a kid. It just randomly struck me that my little creative bits were like butterflies. They are lovelies I caught in a moment of exploratory creativity and in that small frame of time, they became a kind of unexpected friend, going through that creative time with me. I didn’t want to toss my little friends, even though I had no end-use for them. You don’t do that to friends! You hold on to them and support each other, right?

Does that sound silly? Maybe it is, but it was revealing to me to realize that I kept certain pieces not because they were so beautiful or well done, but because I felt connected to them. So, why not collect them and put them out like a collection of butterflies or a collage of photos? What you see here is what I started making. My husband and I would find shadow boxes at garage sales and thrift stores for cheap, and I’d arrange my bits in them like compositional jigsaw puzzles. I’ve made half a dozen of these so far.

By the way, I use a hot melt glue gun to tack the pieces onto a bit of mat board cut to fit the box. The nice thing about the hot melt glue is that if you do every want to take a piece out of the collection, you warm the back of the mat board with heat gun or hair dryer for a couple seconds and pop them right off. So, your “friends” can come out and play in another piece or a new collection if you like!

As I shared in the previous version of this blog in 2019, people have also used old collectibles display boxes to show off small sculptural pieces or heavy pieces of fabric to pin or hook jewelry pieces as a means of display as well. Look around at how you are other people put together collectibles for ideas about how you might display your polymer bits.

So, do I have your little wheels turning? These should give you ideas not just for what to do with your extra bits, but many of these could be a jumping-off point for creating your own unique show displays and photo setups.

Do you have a cool and unique way to display your extra bits or jewelry? Send me links to images if you do. Put it in the comments below, or if you’re reading this by email, click the header for this post to get to it online to leave a comment.

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