Only one more Sunday night in the school year.

Life with a 12 year old who doesn't like school means a whole lot of Sunday night drama and angst.

I have a choice:  get completely sucked into the vortex of tears, or throw myself into art making while saying "I'll be right here if you need me."

Tonight I chose the latter.

(remind me next Sunday to do the same)

I mean, if I'm going to be up way too late and be totally bleary eyed and crabby at work tomorrow, at least I'll have something to show for it.

Here are four index card collages from the past few hours:

I really really really want a "withdrawn" stamp of my own.  It's such a relevant word for me.  This one was cut from a discarded library book. 

The arrows are the plastic safety seal from the neck of a new bottle of mouthwash.  It's all fair game!

 

The theme of this week seems to be recycling.

I have a friend who works at Smith College and she started saving the glossy little posters advertising campus events - giving them to me instead of tossing them in the recycling bin.

Each of the above collages feature bits of those flyers.

It's wonderful to have friends who look at trash and say "I bet Karen would like this."

I also visited my favorite local recycling center this week - Extras For Creative Reuse in Lynn, MA.

I was primarily there to get things for the kids to use in my summer camp program this year, but naturally I found all kinds of interesting tidbits for myself, including a big bag of vintage dress patterns, some scrapbooky type papers (that silver lattice stuff in the red and black card above) and other delightful bits of crap rescued from the landfill.  

This one features a phone book snagged from the lobby of an office building, some sticker waste snagged from the recycle bin at work, a girl from the newly acquired dress patterns, and text from an ad jammed under my windshield wiper while I was grocery shopping.

The green paper is part of an envelope I got from Ria.  More of the cool lattice stuff from "extras", text from that same windshield flyer.

the orange bits are from a flyer Gina sent me.  The security envelope with the holes in it is the scrap leftover from the air bubbles I made in the card above.  The background is a napkin that someone sent me a hundred years ago.

Fun with big chunks of text cut from one of the Smith College flyers.

It's nearly midnight.  The boy is finally asleep.  I am almost hallucinating with exhaustion, but I haven't missed a day of ICAD yet, and I'm closing the gap on the 365 collages challenge.  (Only 29 days behind!)

One more Sunday night, and then a two month reprieve.

Here's hoping we all survive the 6th grade.