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Art with Recycled Materials - Baba Yaga's Suitcase

2/6/2014

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My neighbor Fred and I demolished a half-century-old rabbit house a few months ago. I salvaged some of the boards for some wabi-sabi building projects I wanted to do in my house. "If you are attracted to things soaked in rabbit pee, then perhaps you would like these moldy suitcases?" Fred asked solicitously, dragging them out from under a pile of really, really old hay.

They were indeed moldy. I can't figure out how to open the leather one. I soaked them with high-surfactant cleaners, taking care to put the waste water into the garden where the potentially harmful surfactants would be biodegraded quickly. 
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I decided the nylon liner was just too awful. Underneath, there was some kind of fluffy padding, which I scraped off and threw out, to reveal buckled plywood panels. Cool! But Baba Yaga, while she would certainly carry around a battered up suitcase, would want to over-decorate it with doilies and other old lady stuff. I imagine that here, in the New World, she would want to open her suitcase and find the forest in it (and not, for example, an elderly black cat. Just as an example).

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I have a stack of empty feedsacks. My land is too small to entirely support my two sheep and six ducks through the off-season, so I supplement their grazing with 50 lb sacks of alfalfa and corn. I give most of the empties to a lady at the District Office who makes carry totes from them, but reserved some of them and gessoed their backs.
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Next, to paint a forest scene on a feedsack.
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I am trying to decide whether to put the doilies on the bottom or on the lid of the suitcase. The forest scene will go on the other piece.
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