Turn Old Cassettes Into ART THAT ROCKS!

Mix tapes, copies of albums, radio recordings, favorite tapes and cassingles...

I'd like to introduce you to the best thing I've ever made in my life: cassettes on canvas. It all began when my dad chased me down with my old tape collection. He was like, yeah, so this is getting dusty, taking up space in our house, and they're yours so here! Wellllll....something like that! Anyway, my hoard of precious musical memories was now my clutter to deal with. They stayed under the bed for a long time. What could I do with them? I no longer had a tape player. Useless...

They were so cool; I wanted to look at them all the time, but how could I do that? MOUNT THEM!

I found the largest canvas Michael's had to offer, brought it home, decoupaged a music weekly newspaper onto it, then used E6000 (best glue EVER!) to stick 120 cassettes onto it. If I did one row up and the next down they fit closely together.

Everyone loved it. It was fun to read messages from past BFF's 4ever scribbled in bubbly writing. From my first Guns N Roses cassingle to Debbie Gibson & Tiffany, to Bobby Brown and Motley Crue - the story was written on the wall.

Sadly I am referring to this beauty in past tense - it was lost in the fire, of course. It looked like a whole new piece of art the way the tapes had melted and then frozen into plastic-place. Who knows, someone may have it; someone's dumpster diving score.

I've thought about rebuilding it even though it wouldn't be the same. I have some DVDs and CDs that we took out of the cases (though they don't work - soot damage - boo). Oh, and here's something I can laugh about now (especially knowing they don't work!): the dudes who came to board up the windows the night after the fire to keep people from breaking in stole a bunch of stuff (!!!!!) including our Wii games/system and all my music except for the Tori Amos collection!

So maybe someday there will be a newer version of the retro twist...but until then I wanted to share the idea in case you, too, have a lot of tapes you'd like to keep where you can seem them...