The Red Queen Principle

The Red Queen said that you have to keep running just to stay in place. Isn't that what life feels like?
Well, that's what I've been thinking about a lot lately and so it ended up being explored in this shrine. The mat board and recycled paper came from Trash 2 Treasures. There is an art challenge coming up, you need to use 75% materials that are gathered from Trash 2 Treasures. This shrine is more or less experimental since I wasn't sure what techniques to use. Shrines are very popular right now in the altered art world. It seemed like a good way to start.

You need a very sharp knife to cut the mat board or it will rip. Since mine wasn't, the next step was to cover up those rips. The recycled paper makes nice papier mache.

Since books are part of my shtick, there's a book in it's own niche, made from some of my very own handmade paper. This paper is very nice smelling too, since the teacher, Trish Halverson, brought some tea in that day and we added that to the pulp.

The food references didn't even occur to me until just now, but the sticks on the book binding are bamboo skewers that I painted, and the tin with the shell on the left was a food mold of some sort. Hm. That's the cool thing about creating stuff, though, isn't it, how stuff just sort of comes out without you realizing until later. I love that.
Here's the back, if I hadn't managed to take the picture right in front of my lamp/magnifier, you could probably see the top better, oh well.

Hope you are on top of it all today, dear reader.
Barb V.