01 July 2008

Found poetry

One of the swaps I'm participating in is about reusing/recycling and Found poetry. I've always loved writing poetry but it's been quite a few years since I've done it so I thought that doing this swap would be a good way to play with words again.

The idea of the swap is to use discarded papers or left-overs from another project to make the background. Some people have used images from magazine. I personally use a lot of patterned paper and cardstock so I just picked a few pieces from my big baggie of left-overs. The tarot paper is a wrapping paper I've kept for many years because I loved how it looked. I had used pieces of it on chunky pages for another swap so I decided to use some more on these cards. The text is from "The house at Pooh's corner" which is, for those who don't know, a Winnie the Pooh story. The text itself was already full of poetic words so it was easy to create beautiful found poetry.

I liked making these cards so much that I made a second series with different papers and a text page from an old National Geographic about rock climbing/trekking. Completely different for the poetry but a lot of fun too. I plan on doing even more of these types of cards so if anyone wants to trade Found Poetry ATCs with me, don't be shy and contact me. It's a good way to get started with ATCs if you've never tried them before: a simple background collage and assembled words/phrases to complete. The only thing I added other than that was inking the edges for a more uniform look but even that is not required.

Well, I'm off to create more ATCs for swaps and for fun. Happy Canada Day to all my Canadian friends. And if you're moving today or helping someone move, stay safe!

1 comment:

Janet said...

I love that tarot paper! And your ATC is so cool (I have some of that same paper you used on the left side.) And how interesting that I just made three ATCs the other day while I was cleaning off my work table. I used scraps of leftover paper and cut movie titles from an old movie encyclopedia!