MetaFilter posts tagged with mosaics

Crafting can be the perfect way to cap off your St. Patrick's Day celebration!

orange swan — Tue, 17 Mar 2009 16:04:12 -0800

For St. Patrick's Day, rather than show you how to knit your own leprechaun or make a hat out of a ice cream container (because who the hell wants to do that), I'm going to help you with your after party cleanup. You'll have lots of bottle caps and wine corks lying about afterwards, so here are some ideas on what to do with them. Bottle caps lend themselves to making interesting jewelry: resin necklaces, brace lets, small pins and brooches, beads, or rings. Here are some tips on how to make bottle cap jewelry. You can also make a purse, hairbows, keychains, magnets or mini pin cushions. You can make a trivet to suit your taste: plain, covered in plain crochet, or covered in whimsical crochet. You can decorate a picture frame simply or elaborately, or decorate your kitchen cabinets or table tops. You can make Christmas decorations. Or you can avoid paying to have the car repainted. You can create tiny artwork, or like artist John T. Unger make mermaid or fish mosaics. You can make a dragon mosaic, or just embellish mosaics made from other materials, or make portraits like artist Molly B. Right. See this article for some other ideas on how to use bottle caps. If you favour wine over Guinness, you have options for what to do with the corks. You can make earrings, or stampers, trivets and coasters, place-card holders, or bulletin boards. You can decorate a mirror frame. You might make some Bacchanalian wreaths, or a garland. For Christmastime reminders of festivities past, you can make a miniature Christmas tree, or decorations for your full-size tree: clowns, snowmen, Santas, or reindeer. You can make a mural, or a self-portrait. You can make a lamp, a table top, or a chair. You can use wine corks as baseboards, or as the wall. You can make a birdhouse, or mulch plants. Again, there’s really no need to pay to have the car repainted. If none of these ideas pop your cork, see this thread for more suggestions on how to use them. And if you really have enough bottle caps and wine corks lying around to make more than a few of these projects, next year I would like to be invited to your St. Patrick’s Day party.

Moasics: they aren't just for Roman bath houses anymore!

orange swan — Tue, 16 Sep 2008 13:27:46 -0800

Uh oh, you smashed a dish while you were washing up. But you don't get upset, because you know what to do with the pieces. Being both cultured and crafty, you not only know about the long and illustrious history of mosaic art but also that you can make mosaics from china and ceramic shards as well as pebbles, beads (new or removed from old jewelery), shells, marbles, or even lego or Scrabble tiles. So you take those pieces of your broken plate (and others that klutzy you has broken in the past) and, following some basic instructions, make numbers for your house, a fire place surround, a birdbath, a flower pot, a table or two or four, a tray, picture or mirror frames, a wall mural/homage to Hitchcock, or even a floor. By now you're wishing you had a spare basilica or Roman villa so you could really go nuts. And, besides planning on picking up some thrift shop china, you're eyeing that 48-piece reindeer-and-elves Christmas dinnerware set your mother-in-law gave you a few years back and thinking it's really too bad you're so clumsy and likely to break it in the very near future.

It's just a bunch of squares

Pretty_Generic — Tue, 10 Dec 2002 03:00:43 -0800

I hope you find these abstract mosaics as stimulating as I do. But are they NSFW?