Did you know that March 22 is World Water Day? It's a UN led initiative, and they have a great page of resources for you to explore on the theme of protecting the universal human right to clean water.
There are stories to read, posters to share, activities to explore, and more. Water is such an important right!
Beyond fair access to water, I'm also concerned about the health of our waterways. Our library co-hosted a talk on plastic pollution recently, and I discovered that the freshwater Great Lakes are just as contaminated as our oceans, though ocean pollution is much more widely discussed. This was depressing! But they also talked about things to do to reduce your plastic waste as individuals, alongside requesting governmental and corporate change, of course, which was much less depressing.
One of the art projects I'm currently working on is based on a water theme. Looking at the vast amount of plastic pollution in our oceans, I discovered that all species are affected, from marine vegetation all the way up to whales and dolphins. So I chose a handful of particularly at risk species and started a project.
I've started embroidering from the bottom up, starting with red coral. Plastics do a lot of damage: they can smother coral reefs and encourage the growth of damaging algae, limiting the growth of new coral and killing the old.
This is the first panel, to be followed by a Loggerhead turtle, and then a couple of more species, and will be hung as one long piece. It's slow work -- I take the blue filmy plastic bags that newspapers come in, iron them into fused sheets (6-8 layers between large sheets of blank newsprint or parchment paper, ironed evenly at about a rayon setting until they are the amount of fused that you like. Wait til it has cooled down to try to peel the paper off). Then I stitch through the plastic. It's actually quite easy but does take a bit of time, so I have no anticipated end date for this project!
Fab use of waste plastic- love it!
ReplyDeleteThank you! I fuse it outside to avoid fumes; now that the weather is warming up I'll make some more sheets. There is unfortunately always a lot of waste plastic around work. So I try to recycle.
DeleteI just read that somewhere a dead whale was found and it had 50 lbs (@25 kilo) of plastic in its belly. So sad what we humans are doing to rest of the species.
ReplyDeleteGreat idea to repurpose plastic. My newspaper comes in an orange wrapper—not as pretty as you blue! Renita in NC
I saw that too -- how awful. It really does seem to be more and more of a problem.
DeleteThis is going to be lovely! I hate what people are doing to our oceans and land! We all need to work on being better stewards of our environment.
ReplyDeleteYes, doing this reminds me to work harder also. It's just awful to see our own effects on our environment.
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