altered driftwood

In my opinion anything can be transformed into art. I have been painting and altering driftwood for years and when I moved back to the Oregon Coast (where there is more driftwood than you ever could imagine!) I started collecting and altering my findings with the goal of building up a collection that I could turn into art and display in my new studio/classroom space. 

I started by collecting lots of driftwood- if you don't have driftwood available sticks or twigs will work just fine.


I then used scraps of hand painted fabric and wrapped the scraps around the wood, applying Tacky Glue to the surface as I wrapped.




I wrapped colorful embroidery floss around the surface to create a stripe of color- gluing the floss as I wrapped.



The result is a colorful and fun altered piece of driftwood.

I then created wood wrapped with yarn and embroidery floss.

I even created a variety of painted driftwood by first painting stripes and then adding embellishments with Scribbles 3-D Paint (MY FAVORITE SUPPLY!)

At this point you are probably saying to yourself- those are pretty but what the heck are you supposed to do with a whole bunch of altered sticks?!?! Well, with a little creativity there are all kinds of things you could do but my vision all along was to fill a variety of large glass jars with my artful driftwood and display them around my studio. I used large jars (3-4 foot) and filled them up and placed them around the room. I like to think of them as a unique nature inspired art piece.

I also created small mobiles to hang above my work space.

I have been so obsessed with altering driftwood that I started collecting LARGE pieces and decorating the surface with the same techniques and using them as art around my space.


With just a few supplies, something simple is suddenly transformed into art!