Project Fridge Magnets

I finally found a use for those promotional fridge magnets that get shoved in your letterbox every so often. For years, I would use them for a while before finally throwing them in the bin, trying to ignore my feelings of guilt at adding perfectly good (albeit ugly, irritating and unwarranted) resources to landfill. But after seeing them used by a teacher as backing to create new, quirky magnets for their classroom, I actually willingly collected a whole lot of those unwanted magnets through Buy Nothing. Since then I have transformed portrait shots of politicians, outdated calendars, and ads for local businesses into magnets of dice and scrabble tiles (with plans to add foreign coins, buttons and bobbin cases to the collection). I have always liked the look of the Keen’s curry powder jar so I even turned an old one of those into a magnet, making me feel a bit Andy Warhol… while in reality being much more like the mum from The Castle.