A few weekends ago, I talked my husband Matt into going to an event at the Materials Recovery Facility in Ann Arbor. We were going to get a tour of the plant, and, best of all, we were going to "create a mosaic tile from clay and found and recycled materials." For some reason, this is what I was expecting my final product to look like (maybe mine would have more dragons? I wasn't sure yet...):
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| Sweet piece of art found in my mother-in-law's bathroom. |
So we woke up at the crack of dawn (okay, 10 a.m.) and headed to the MRF. There's a long road near the intersection of Platt and Ellsworth that you take for about a mile to get to the MRF building. As we walked up to the entrance, two volunteers greeted us excitedly. They led us up stairway to the community room, and the whole way up I just kept thinking, "Wow, this is a great deal! A tour of the facility AND an amazing piece of dragon art to take home and hang on our wall. Totally free!"
As soon as we stepped in to the community room, Matt grabbed my hand and squeezed it hard. I couldn't look at him, because I was pretty sure that I would burst out laughing. Instead, I slowly nodded my head while looking around and taking stock of the room. We were the only adults, but the room was crowded. Crowded with a Cub Scouts group. I say Cub Scouts because, as a proud former Girl Scout and pseudo-Venture Scout, I know there was no way that these little guys were old enough to be legit Boy Scouts. There were some male chaperones, but they were mostly in the corners of the room on their phones, so I don't really count them as participants in the craft du jour. There was also a group of very small girls with their mother, who WAS doing the craft. Not sure if that really counts, though.
We sat down in some [kiddie] chairs at an empty [kiddie] table and prepared our paper bags on which we were to practice our mosaics.
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| A very good sport. |
We grabbed some "recycled materials" from which we were to create our mosaic tiles.
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| PINK FEATHER FOR THE WIN, but buttons? Really? |
I made sure to grab the only pink feather that I saw, knowing that if I didn't jump on that shit right away, one of those little girls most definitely would. I also grabbed some buttons, but I wondered if these were really recycled materials from the plant. Was there someone standing at the conveyor belt grabbing all the buttons they saw from the piles of other recycled materials? Anyway, back to my craft.
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| So thankful for my big pink feather! |
Not sure exactly what happened to my dragons, but I am happy enough with the final result. Matt engi-nerded the project and arranged all his recycled materials on the brown bag. He then took his little disk of [foam] "clay" and pushed it down really hard on all his little pieces. I don't think he was all that pleased with his result, since he wouldn't let me take a photo of it at that time. So instead I took a photo of it when we got home, because I think it is quite nice.
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| So pretty! |
While we were making our craft, one of the volunteers led a discussion on recycling. "What is recycling?" "What kinds of things do your parents recycle?" At this point I remembered that we were two adults in a sea of children, and I should definitely not be raising my hand.
We then went on a tour of the recycling plant. [BTW, people! Rinse before recycle! The smell was awful, and I feel so bad for the people working there!]
The tour was really interesting, and Matt made it even more entertaining by pretending to push a lot of forbidden buttons.
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| Tsk, tsk! |
So this idea of mine for an adventure was a bit of a fail, but it was what made me decide to start this blog. Even though I totally misunderstood the activity description (damn you, dragons), we still had a lot of fun! The volunteers at the MRF were great, too, and if I had kids I would definitely bring them to an activity like this. We did get two sweet pieces of art that I still plan to hang in our apartment...
Since Matt was such a good sport (and only made fun of me for about an hour as opposed to all day), I treated him to lunch at Corner Brewer, AND I let him beat me twice in chess. Overall, a good Saturday morning!
