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CDs: What To Do With Them?

CDs are everywhere, in landfills around the world.   What if we could find a useful re-purpose for these ubiquitous items?  If you google "recycling CDs" you will find a lot of suggestions.  We tried baking, boiling, sawing, drilling, smashing, gluing, cutting, pinking, wood-tooling, soldering to make some beautiful and or pracical items from the many many spare CDs in our world.  Here are a few:

Shiny Boa With Blinking Lights
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By: Thelma Snyder
 A very hip and sparkly high-tech "Green" fashion statement with blinking battery operated lights.  Just the thing to liven up a holiday party!
See D's
cdloisadam.jpg
By: Lois Adam

The rapid pace of technological change sometimes has this artist seeing stars, but this time she is "seeing" D's with her high-tech specticles.

Mosaic
cdmosaic.JPG
By: Theresa Palermo

The CDs were much more durable than I expected and it was more difficult to get similar sized pieces than I thought.  The pieces were painted with acrylic paint and then assembled.

Raining C(ats) & D(ogs)
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By: Mabel Hanscom

This whimsical mobile made of broken CDs is "raining" C(ats) & D(ogs). 

CD Quilt
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By: Kathy Nichols

Traditional quilting takes scraps of material that have been well-used and are often meaningful, and stitches them together in a new form.  The old bits each have their own story, contributing to the meaning of the new creation as well.  I have used these traditional methods and motifs to combine bytes of contemporary stories with bits of meaningful music from friends and family.

CD Earrings
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By: Kerry Treasure

I was hoping that the sheen and sparkle of CDs would translate into shiny color-changing earrings.  Unfortunatly, the "silver" layer tends to crack and peel off when the CD is cut.  Thus, they make an "okay" base for earrings but, then again, a plastic milk jug would work almost as well. 

CD World Collage
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By: Sarah Groff

PIcking up on the unique reflective feature of CDs, I combined these with round mirrors and other found objects.  The underlying piece is the project I did for the Studio X theme "Revolutions".

King Of Pop
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By: Sarah Groff

This deep shadow box pays tribute to the stars of popular music over the years, from records and albums, to tapes, to CDs (and, presumably, soon to downloads only).  Michael Jackson, recently deceased at the time of this project, hovers ethereally on the front of the shadow box, which is embellished with a hand painted musical score.

Gutter Rain Diffuser
cdraincatchercropped.jpg
By: Kerry Treasure

I wanted to make something that was useful (not just decorative), and to make something that would take the place of a product that is already on the market but made from different materials.  My neighbor has a big brass chain hanging from the top of her gutter to diffused the rain and keep it from carving a hole in her garden below the gutter.  This piece serves the same purpose and looks lovely in the sunlight, as well.