I've been a fan of junk and rusty stuff and odd bits for decades.  I've cycled through obsessions with crafting in different materials for the past 50 years. From sandblasted glass to mosaics, dried gourds to needle felting.  For a sampling see Nature Walk Gifts.

 

Moving to Portland put me right in the middle of a rich reuse and recycling culture.  I discovered ReClaim It, a retail store sponsored by the non-profit Cracked Pots.  It gets the vast majority of the cool stuff in the store from the transfer station (aka "city dump.")  

 

I became enamored for awhile of making flowers from cast-off materials.   I was in several shows. 

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And then, one day, there was a sweet little doll head sitting on the shelf in the store.  It was ceramic and had a hole in the top (where a clever doll maker would be able to add hair.   I happened to have a solar light sitting around in my workshop.  It fit perfectly in the hole. 

 

I had an glass ashtray from Goodwill, a box of used glass marbles and these cool embellishments made by a guy who poured colored material down copper pipes and then sliced the pipe into thin discs.  Colored the black plastic solar light with copper paint, poured epoxy over the marbles and had a little mashup.  

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I sat it out in the garden and when I checked on it in the evening that sweet faced, wide-eyed doll had turned demonic.  It was marvelous! It made me laugh out loud - the ultimate measure, to me, of a successful creation.  

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A new obsession was born.

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