crafts for earning and learning
As soon as you buy a computer, hordes of alien catalogs invade your mailbox. Some companies send new catalogs every week! This is marketing overkill, an environmental threat, and just plain gluttony. Recycling is the minimum required response.
On the way to the recycling bin, the catalogs can also provide some art value–and hours of amusement–when you use them for collage. With all those tiny machine pictures, computer supplies catalogs are especially good for creating robots, alien invaders, spaceships and other fantasies from science fiction.
How might you turn this idea into money? For greeting cards, simpler works of collage art are best. Otherwise cutting and pasting all those little pieces takes too much time for multiple copies to be profitable. Producing machine-made multiple copies just gets you back to using up more paper.
A much better question: How might we turn this idea into profit? Creating new wholes from old parts is tremendously profitable as an art experiment. Your friendships profit when you make and send funny one-of-a-kind cards and posters. Your community profits when you work together for fundraising events.
Our whole society might profit if people made collaged postcards out of old catalogs and then mailed the cards to mail order companies and elected officials, along with notes asking for reasonable curbs on the paper invasions. If you don't have time or inclination to make the art, please at least send the messages.
