Cassie Peters turns trash into treasure

Cassie Peters hates to throw anything away. She can take seemingly any item and incorporate it into her artwork. Peters is a craftswoman and photographer who sells her wares at local farmers markets, including Washington?s. She was at the market Thursday sharing a table with her father, Scott, who was selling tools he made in his blacksmith?s shop.

Peters displayed a number of homemade necklaces which featured ?found art,? as she calls it. The decorations for the necklaces are things Peters finds around the house, such as old bottle caps. She makes art out of safety pins, pull keys and vintage license plates.

?I use tin snips to cut up the license plates,? said Peters. ?This one says ?79. Someone who was born in that year might want it.?

She even uses the scrap wood left over from her father?s projects. Scott makes metallic tools for gardening and cooking. He gives the tools wooden handles. When he cuts off the end of the handle to make it flat, he tosses the end aside. Cassie intercepts that piece of scrap before it enters the trash bin. She dresses it up, paints it a different color, and turns it into a marketable commodity.

Peters is also fond of photography.

?I like to take pictures and digitally edit them,? she said. ?If we drive past a barn quilt, I?ll grab the camera and snap a picture really fast as we?re going by. Sometimes they?re blurry. But other times, they?re good enough that you can digitally change them to make them look nice.?

Peters showed customers a photo she took of a barn quilt between Washington and Kalona. She printed the photo on ordinary photo paper, but before she did so she altered the image to give it a rough look. The photo appears to have been printed on an old canvas, but this is an illusion created by the editing.

?That photo effect also covered up the spots on the window that day,? said Peters.

When she?s not refining her crafting skills, Peters is outside playing with her horses, of which she has three.

?I was in 4-H and FFA, and that?s when I showed the horses,? she said. ?Now I keep them as pets.?

Her horses have provided her with a few trinkets to decorate.

?When you have horses, you have a lot of left-over horseshoes,? she said.

Just a few days ago, she painted one of the horseshoes and put it up for sale at Thursday?s farmers market.

?I painted it purple, and when that paint dried I put gold glitter paint on top of it,? she remarked. ?This is the first horseshoe I?ve ever painted.?

Peters has an interesting story about one of her projects that went from treasure to trash back to treasure. Many years ago, Peters won an award for her sewing abilities. She found a piece of wood on which to put the plaque. She waited and waited but the plaque never came.

?I had this piece of wood lying around, and after 10 years, I said, ?Let?s do something with it,?? said Peters.

Peters put a vintage postcard on the piece of wood, which is something she has done many times.

?I started collecting vintage postcards to scan them and sell the reproductions,? she said. ?They?re old enough to be in the public domain. Some of them I resell to buy more, while others I use in my art.?

On one piece of scrap wood Peters created a layered collage of artwork. She found a vintage dictionary and turned to the page with the word ?button? at the top. She took out the page and put hot glue on one side. Then she laid the page on the wood and ran a credit card over the page to remove the air bubbles. In keeping with the theme, she attached to the page a dozen or so buttons, as well as a spool and part of a ruler.

Peters refers to her creations as ?mixed media? because the artwork comes from many difference sources. She has been interested in photography since she was a young girl, but has only recently expanded into other artistic realms.

?Collecting is something I?ve started doing lately,? she said. ?I?ve always had buttons but normally I just left them in Grandma?s sewing room.?