Three Simple Handcrafts Made from old DVD's or CD-ROM's

I have now made 3 simple, pretty decorations or useless ornaments (depending on an individual's opinion) out of buttons, glass beads, assorted bits & pieces and old dvd's or cd-rom's.  All that is needed is an old disc of some sort, and something to glue to it, along with some glue.  I used PVA glue, because that is what I have here already.

I first got the idea for doing this from a collection of assorted bits and pieces like shells, labels off electrical goods, old jewellery, beads, ornamental erasers & other fairly useless items that I kept for quite a long time.  I kept wondering how to display these things in a way that hopefully would be interesting.

I also thought that old cd-roms and informational dvd's that my sons threw out, were too good to be consigned to the bin.  At first I thought about gluing 6 of them together to make a cube, but this would have taken up too much space and wouldn't look very good.  Then the idea of gluing the detritus (as I call the bits and pieces of chain, the metal seahorse, the plastic skull etc) to one of the old dvd's occurred to me.

I ran out of things to glue to it and I think that it might look better if it was thickly encrusted with detritus so that nothing of the dvd shows through, but I was happy to finally do something with this detritus rather than saving it all in a plastic box (along with other interesting bits & pieces).

I was encouraged by the way that my 3 sons all liked this disc, with one of them telling me that it was amazingly tactile to hold or touch, and the PVA glue worked well, so I then sorted out some of those glass beads that you buy to put in the base of vases, into the colors that I've used below - blue and transparent.  I also used some black plastic beads that I already had, that my sons have occasionally mistaken for licorice.

I have a collection of buttons that I keep in a tin.  Not only have I been saving buttons for years, but when he was very small, one of my sons stayed with one of my sisters who was then collecting buttons - buying them at auctions as well as cutting them off any old clothes that she had, and saving them.  My son began to save buttons too, but quickly lost interest, so I ended up with his discarded buttons as well as the ones that I had saved over the years just in case I need to replace a button on a piece of clothing.

For this disc, I decided to use buttons that I would be unlikely to sew on any clothes.  It was harder than I thought to go through my tin  and select buttons that looked good together.  After all, I have buttons of many different shapes, sizes, colors & materials.  At last I thought that I had a good selection, so I started gluing.

This is what they all look like together -

As for the doll house - it is now glued together with the back and middle reinforced with extra cardboard, and some of the flaps cut off the boxes.  I must now glue cardboard to the sides to reinforce them, and then I intend to try making papier mache to plaster over the two boxes, to make the structure even stronger.  I mean to take a photograph of the doll house dolls for my next blog.

I'm still learning how to use Blogger, and I don't know how to add people yet.  I think that I saw something o a previous page about adding people.  I will have to check into this.

Thank you very much Sylwia, for letting me know whether doll house and watercolor are two words or one word.  I'm following your advice for these from now on!!!!