When I made the decision in July 2023 to spend a year picking up odds and ends that seemed worthy for my potential purposes, I had no idea how much I would collect. Although I picked up something almost every day, I filled just five test tubes, four dessert glasses, a sugar bowl, three small vases and two bottles with the various found objects. I didn't know what I would ultimately do with or from the collection. The only thing I thought I knew was that I would use the colourful pieces of glass to make a lampshade. After all, you can always find broken glass everywhere. However, as you can see in the picture, the bottles are only a quarter full of shards. I have to say that I only picked up shards if they appealed to me in terms of colour or sparkled in the sunlight and I couldn't find anything else. I didn't pick up brown glass at all (which was a mistake, of course). Green was also too common for me, so I mainly picked up light blue and this glass is not so common in cullet. There were also red and orange plastic shards from broken car lights. My finds were also only supposed to be small, and the glass was mostly just tiny individual pieces.  So the lamp will probably have to wait another year.

After a few weeks, when I had a few beads and sequins together, I sorted them and tried out a few formations. I thought I could use them later to make a kaleidoscope sparkle. But in the end, it wasn't to be, because these small parts were perfect for the figures that were to complete my project.
However, I was able to realise one thing that occurred to me during the collecting phase. There's a separate story about that.

 

Gradually, I began to develop an idea of my project, which I could realise at the end of the year with the collected pieces.
Not translated
Recycling Art - found objects It took a year from the idea of randomly found small parts to the recycling project