Tag: collecting

Old Stuff Gets New Life

  • Tennis ball art made of 160 balls. Some of the balls can be moved around in order to create different formations. (Photo courtesy of Britten Stringwell)

Everyone has stuff. Probably too much stuff. Stuff you don’t use anymore, stuff that’s just
gathering dust in a box somewhere. Sure, you could recycle it. Or, as reporter Jennifer
Guerra discovered, you could turn some of that stuff into art:

Transcript

Everyone has stuff. Probably too much stuff. Stuff you don’t use anymore, stuff that’s just
gathering dust in a box somewhere. Sure, you could recycle it. Or, as reporter Jennifer
Guerra discovered, you could turn some of that stuff into art:


Vivienne Armentrout has only the essentials in her house. A table, some chairs, a
sideboard. Maybe a vase with fresh cut flowers from her garden. But that’s it. No clutter,
no knick knacks. Armentrout doesn’t like to have stuff lying around her house. So she
gets rid of it. But she doesn’t just throw it out or recycle it:


“The thing is, it’s easy to recycle. You just load up everything take it down to drop off
center and put it in the appropriate bin. And that’s okay for material recovery. But a lot of
objects have a real use still and that would be a waste. ”


Like fabric, for example. Armentrout says there’s nothing inherently wrong with
recycling old neck ties or curtain remnants. But if you go that route, the material will
probably just end up being turned into stuffing for seat cushions:


“But I think making them into a beautiful piece of art is a much better use.”




Now you might be thinking to yourself, okay, sounds like a cool idea…but I’m not an
artist! That’s ok, you don’t have to be. That’s where someone like Britten Stringwell
comes in. Stringwell calls herself a…


“A creative, inspirational doer…or artist.”


Stringwell and Armentrout live in the same town. But they never met until Armentrout
read an article about Stringwell in a local paper. Stringwell had some art work on display
at a coffee shop, so the paper was doing a little bio on her. When Armentrout read that
Britten Stringwell used recycled materials in her pieces, Armentrout immediately went to
work. She went through boxes of stuff she had in her attic and in her basement. Armentrout
invited Stringwell over to her house and together, the two sifted through old metal gears, antique
furniture knobs and wooden beads.


Some of the items Stringwell took home with her. Some she didn’t. Stringwell’s quick to
point out that she doesn’t just take anything that’s handed to her:


“I don’t like to keep collecting things, but if I can help to inspire other people who
would use them, too, is really important.”


I think that’s key to understanding what drives Stringwell to do what she does. She likes to make connections, she likes to form relationships with people.


People – strangers – will read or hear about Stringwell and they’ll invite her into their
house. Virtual strangers! Sometimes they have her over for tea, maybe a light snack. And
then, they just talk. Mostly, about all the stuff they’ve got in their basement and their attic,
and it’s those stories – the stories BEHIND the items and not the actual items themselves – that
Stringwell says inspires her the most:


“More recently, I guess I’ve been interested in not talking so much when I enter a space,
but kind of seeing where the person leads me. And just kind of finding out what’s
important to them or what story comes up and why does this object inspire me more
or them more…”




For example, that’s how Stringwell discovered someone’s box of old tennis balls. An
older woman invited Stringwell into her home one day. The two walked through her
basement, where there were boxes of stuff everywhere. When they came to the box of
tennis balls, the older woman went on and on about her love of the game, and about how she
and her partner used to play tennis all the time when they were younger.


So, Stringwell took those tennis balls home with her and she gave them new life. She put
them in an art piece. Tennis balls that otherwise would have stayed in a box in a
basement or ended up in a landfill somewhere. Stringwell created an interactive composition of
sorts. So within the composition, the balls can be arranged by the viewer to form different
shapes and patterns:


“What’s important is that it becomes this new, physical game. What was important
to them about it. They might not be as physical as they were when they were
younger and playing tennis, but now they can take these things out and play a
matching game and they will change it around and recreate it.”


Of course not everyone is a creative inspirational doer, like Britten Stringwell. But that doesn’t mean you can’t reduce, reuse and recycle. That part’s easy. Everybody gets that. And maybe, while you’re at it, you’ll start to look at all the stuff around you in a different way. Maybe you’ll find your own way to recreate, repurpose and reimagine.


For the Environment Report, I’m Jennifer Guerra.

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Home Renovation Turns Up Surprise for Science

  • Egg collectors kept precise records about where and when their prize possessions were gathered. They carefully removed the contents of the egg, then nested the shells in cedar sawdust to protect them from insects. (Photo courtesy of Carrol Henderson)

More and more people say their favorite hobby is bird-watching. Many travel to hot bird-watching spots, and keep lists of which birds they see and where. A hundred years ago, birders were just as enthusiastic, but they practiced the hobby very differently. They collected bird eggs. A Midwestern farm family recently discovered an ancestor’s egg collection when they were remodeling an old farmhouse. Experts say the collection has a lot to offer to scientists studying birds today. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Stephanie Hemphill reports:

Transcript

More and more people say their favorite hobby is
bird-watching. Many travel to hot bird-watching spots, and keep
lists of which birds they see and where. A hundred years ago,
birders were just as enthusiastic, but they practiced the hobby
very differently. They collected bird eggs.


A Midwestern farm family recently discovered an ancestor’s egg collection when they were
remodeling an old farmhouse. Experts say the collection has a
lot to offer to scientists studying birds today. The Great Lakes
Radio Consortium’s Stephanie Hemphill reports:


Carrol Henderson considers himself a very lucky man. He’s the director of the non-game wildlife program at the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources. He grew up on a farm in central Iowa.


Last summer, he learned that a family in his old neighborhood was renovating a farmhouse. It had belonged to Ralph Handsaker. When Handsaker died thirty years ago, the house was boarded up and left alone.


“… And when the family started renovating this old farmhouse for the great-great-grandson, John Handsaker, along with a number of old animal mounts and interesting things, there were these two large chests with about fifteen drawers each, that were totally filled with little sets of wild bird eggs.”


The smallest egg, from a hummingbird, was small enough to sit on top of a dime. The biggest was an ostrich egg almost six inches long. Some were creamy white, others were speckled, others streaked with color like a Jackson Pollack painting.


There were more than 3,600 eggs, representing more than 400 species of birds from all over the world. And they were in perfect condition.


“Each set of eggs was very neatly labeled with information about the day they were collected, who the collector was, and information about the habitat where the egg was collected. Some of these eggs went all the way back to 1875, and they were collected by over three hundred different people from all over the world.”


This is how nature-lovers expressed their passion in those days. They called themselves oologists. They kept their eggs in drawers lined with cedar sawdust to protect them from insects. They also kept meticulous records.


“So the scientific data was very high quality among these avid collectors. So even today, these provide very important nest records for birds that are now gone. Like in my home county of Story County, Iowa, there were Marble Godwits, King Rails, Prairie Chickens, and Bobwhite Quail, and those are all gone now.”


The birds disappeared as people turned prairies into farms. But Carrol Henderson says the records in the bird collection provide detailed information about where and when they nested.


“And another intriguing thing is that when these people blew out the eggs, there was still a lining of the egg white or albumen left inside the egg. And that still has the original DNA genetic material, so it actually would be possible for scientists to do DNA analysis of these eggs to take a look at how they may compare with birds nowadays.”


Henderson says these collectors didn’t think they were harming the birds. That’s because if their eggs disappear, most birds will lay another set. But competition for the eggs of rare birds was disastrous.


“One person in Philadelphia had a collection of over seven hundred Peregrine Falcon eggs. Another Peregrine egg collector went to the same cliff and collected all the eggs from the Peregrines every year for 29 consecutive years. And then finally the nest was abandoned. And he said it was abandoned due to encroaching civilization. That was where egg collecting really had something of a dark side.”


Eventually, attitudes began to change. In 1918, the federal government passed the Migratory Bird Treaty Act, to protect birds and eggs. But the government let three collectors keep on collecting. One of them was Ralph Handsaker. So his collection goes into the early 1950’s.


Carrol Henderson says there’s a lot to learn from these eggs. One of the best lessons is about human responsibility. Henderson says people these days enjoy nature differently than they did a hundred years ago. But we can still learn something from earlier methods.


“It’s like a little time machine: stepping back in time, seeing what was here, and then looking at what’s changed, and what does that mean for our own conservation efforts, how can we do a better job today to collect information and use that for our own conservation of wildlife species?”


Carrol Henderson’s article about the Handsaker egg collection will appear in the October issue of Birders World magazine. The Handsaker family is planning to donate the collection to a major university.


For the GLRC, I’m Stephanie Hemphill.

The Stone Business Rocks

You might gather a few stones as you walk along the beach, or buy some
at the hardware store to use in landscaping. But if you want to get a
good idea of the wide variety of stones, you might make a visit to the
Stone Zone. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Wendy Nelson reports: