Art from used paper cups and eggboxes
A woman from Portroe has turned to used paper cups, eggboxes and colourful natural dyes extracted from vegetables to make greeting cards, jewellery and other delightful art pieces.
Shirley McLoughney recycles paper cups she collects from restaurants and cafes in Nenagh and transforms them into her own handmade and highly sustainable paper that she uses to make items like greeting cards and bookmarks.
Shirley founded a little craft company, Petals and Paper, around two years ago and now says demand for her environmental-friendly products is going from strength to strength.
Originally from Ardcroney and now living in her mother’s native parish of Portroe, Shirley does all her work from the kitchen of her home on the village’s main street.
She always had an artistic flair, but it is only since her children grew up that she has had the time to really put all her energies into honing her craft.
She started out by doing a range of regular greeting cards.
“But I was creating so much scrap that I decided to look at something more sustainable,” she says. “That’s when I came up with the idea of making my own sustainable paper from throw-away items like takeaway coffee cups and eggboxes. I really love the sustainable side of it, knowing that I’m making use of items that would otherwise go to the bin.”
FARM FEED BAGS
Shirley also uses livestock feed bags to make her crafts, as well as scraps of unused vegetables to make natural dyes that add lovely colours to her creations. Even cash register receipts gathered from local shops are recycled to make her handmade paper.
As for the colours in her work, she says: “I get a lovely sort of purple-black dye from black beans and the colour I get from red cabbage is unreal.
“I also use onions and oranges to get other colours that make lovely natural dyes.”
Shirley, who sells her crafts at a number of local markets, including the weekly Lakeshore Market and Cloughjordan Market, says she is receiving great feedback from customers who love her sustainable approach.
Other items she uses include flowers which she presses to both frame and to embellish her greeting cards and other products such as writing sets, which also form part of her range of creations.
She has displayed her products for the past two years at the Gurteen Energy & Agriculture Show, where they have gone down a treat.
Shirley says: “What I do is completely sustainable. I have farmers knocking on my door with feed bags from which I can make lots of things. I never really thought about the circular economy until I started doing my own art.”
Now she’s looking at going down the recycling route even further and is hoping to used only salvaged timber to make frames in which she sets her pressed flowers.
Recently she created an imaginative alternative to memorial cards by harvesting flowers from the garden of a deceased person and then pressing them to make bookmarks that where then issued to loved ones of the person who had died.
Another project involved pressing and framing a collection of flowers picked from the garden of a woman who had to leave her home and the garden she loved to enter a nursing home in Nenagh. This creation meant the woman could still enjoy her own flowers hanging on the wall in her new home while keeping fresh the memories of her beloved garden.
You can visit ‘Petals & Paper’ on Instagram and Facebook to find out more and see Shirley’s wonderful creations.