In the spirit of Earth Day Carol, I wanted to depict a scene from the story while demonstrating that art can be created using every day items that are easily available around the house. How many of these recycled objects can you identify?
I found inspiration in very common materials found in every room of my home….
in the compost bin….
and even in the trash!
Take a closer look.
Scrooge is a soda bottle. His bed was made with a tofu container, clothes pins, and a cardboard cereal box for the headboard. The quilt & pillow are packing paper and catalog pages both hand and machine sewn. His nightcap is made from a scrap of fabric that I had in my studio.
The Styrofoam character is composed of styrofoam coffee cups, used teabags, coffee filters, wrappers, foil, wax paper and plastic. I even found that I could use a large twist tie that was originally wrapped around a head of lettuce, to create a head dress of assorted trash. Coffee grounds were rubbed onto the surface to bring out the facial image carved into the styrofoam, highlighted with a bit of paint.
The bedside table was made from a cracker box with a bead for the drawer pull. I cut strips from a plastic Walmart bag, braided them and sewed a rug just the way real braided rugs used to be made with old scraps of wool.
The interior walls of the room were a fun challenge. I cut strips of text from a newspaper to make the striped wallpaper and a smoked salmon box provided the perfect frame for the portrait of the teapot, which must be one of Scrooge’s distant relatives.
Finally, the top of a vitamin bottle provided a happy solution to finding a perfectly round clock face, finished with a button for the pendulum. The curtains were cut from a tissue box, the window sill from a cracker box, and the scene outside was created with trees cut from a catalog and a tiny bit of foil for the moon.
About the Artist
Elizabeth Fram exhibits her intensively hand-stitched textile collages nationally. She currently lives with her husband and Greater Swiss Mountain dog, Lola, in the near net-zero house they built on a hill in Vermont. http://www.elizabethfram.com
