It’s amazing how much fun you can have with an empty mackerel tin! I started making these miniature pieces after thinking about caravans as tin cans on the road- and then with my obsession with recycling, well, one thing led to another and now I’ve made a whole series of little pieces housed in recycled mackerel tins!

Tin Can Caravan

This is one of my first experiments with tin can art, I’ve collaged the tin with an old map and used a CAD embroidered caravan on a simple appliqué ground.

Garden Party

This one is more complex, with free machine embroidery on an appliqué ground, and the tin is covered in pages from an old gardening book.

Part of the fun is that the tins come in many different shapes and sizes depending on which brand you buy – so the artworks take on different forms!

I’ve also developed a workshop day where participants learn how to do it too – so there’s a bit of a tin can movement going on! Today I’ve been working in Gateshead with a lovely group, we started off developing story boards of holiday themes, then sketched out designs. The next step was to collage the tins – always fun but a bit sticky! Whilst the tins are drying we take a lunch break and then move on to create the image that will be housed in the tin. To keep things simple today we used needle felting, hand stitching and Bondaweb (can’t do a project without it!) By the end of the day, everyone had produced a unique mini artwork in a tin. It’s always good to get out of my attic studio and work with other people, so big thanks to everyone involved today!