Bamboo Tile Bracelets

When I was a kid, my mom turned me onto collage using the cards I received for my birthday. It's still one of my favorite ways to express myself artistically. When I was a teen, I was a smoker and so were most of the people I hung out with. Everybody had disposable lighters and everyone borrowed each others and you could never be sure who they belonged to. I began to decorate my lighter with stickers and such as a way to identify it, but really because lighters are just too darn plain and they need to be fancied up in my opinion. Some of my friends started to put stickers on their lighters too, but with much less artistic flair. I was creating tiny collages. Stickers gave way to cut out pictures from rock magazines like Creem and Hit Parader and such. I loved giving them as gifts and I still do, even though I no longer smoke.

'Wizard of Oz' bracelet made for my Dorothy loving niece.

One day whilst surfing the web, I came across a tutorial for a bracelet made from bamboo tiles. The artist was a scrapbooker who had stamped some fancy designs on the tiles and strung them together into a stretchy cuff bracelet. Scrapbooking is one of the few genres that I have not really gotten into, and so I didn't have any cool stamps, but I did have a ton of paper scraps I'd been saving for collages. "It's just like my lighter collages from the 80s", I thought. Voila', a new obsession was born. I have since purchased a few snazzy stamps and a whole bunch of letter stamps, so now I can create bamboo tiles bracelets to suit most any style. See more bracelets here.

"Fleur de Lys" stamped & embossed design