Trimming my waste: Week 27 (clock rehab)

Goals - Week 27: 

1. Repurpose
2. Upcycle
3. Draw!

Context: I have a day job. And we recently went through an office expansion and remodel. We did everything we could to minimize the moving waste - e.g. we rented sturdy packing crates for employees instead of buying boxes that would then have to be recycled. The need to pack into (and live out of) crates for a few weeks meant a lot of stuff got purged.

What wasn't trash or recycling got put on a "donate" table. This was a free-for-all for a couple of weeks and then we donated most of what was left. What we couldn't donate, like a pile blank CDs, we shipped to a specialty recycler.

The one thing I took from the pile was this little clock. It's a well-made, albeit dusty, little holiday souvenir. Do I need another clock? Not at home. But at work... well, I don't have desk clock :)

Look at all those pieces! I will point out again: the frame on this thing is classy. The actual board holding the clock mechanism, not so much. But for my purposes, that didn't matter. 

Plan A: cover the Hawaii image with something else. Ultimately, this didn't work out. I could't get the original paper image off the particle board backing. And simply gluing the new image over the old resulted in a mess. So I put it aside and worked on the other parts.

Painting the frame took a while... it needed about 4 coats.

Onto plan B: I turned the clock board over, painted it white and forced myself to draw something. I did about five practice runs of this drawing on paper before I committed pencil to white paint. My relatively steady line-drawing hand did not, however, love the paint pens. I mean, I LOVE the paint pens - they were perfect for this! But they were a challenge for my inexperienced hands. 

This drawing was inspired by something I saw online a long time ago. I wish I knew where so I could credit the artist. But I can't find it again. I love it because, to my eyes, it's very South African. The stylized protea and details in the circle. Do I love my final rendition? Eh. I can see about six things I want to fix, erase or add to. But, I can't. Black oil paint is permanent. So there it is. 

Once the paint dried, I attached a new mechanism and new hands and put the whole thing back together.

It's cute right? 

Basic quartz mechanisms run on batteries. I have a set of Eneloop rechargeable batteries that power most of the things in my home. But last year I backed a Kickstarter for these little micro-USB rechargeables (similar to this). Since I will ultimately take this clock to work, I like having a battery in it that I can recharge with my laptop. 

Here's to turning someone else's trash into a treasure!