UPDATE: EAST LANSING - Jane Reiter is a local artist who loves turning trash into treasure. This is her story...

My first passion was always art and even as a kid, I loved to take pieces of fabric and cut them up and make doll clothes and everything like that. My mom taught me to sew as a high school student.

My academic background is in weaving and textile design. I studied at Indiana University in Bloomington. And then I went to graduate school at the University of Kansas in Lawrence, Kansas. I ended up moving back to Michigan in 2000. I actually grew up in the Haslett area, but had moved away at college.

I think it's important for artists to provide a new way of looking at old things. So, I think it's important to recycle and re-purpose because many many objects that are discarded objects in our world can have a second life as something else.

I had started really getting into collage and incorporating some of my stuff. Upon moving here I really got into doing a lot of mixed media collage and that just naturally, I was recycling paper, more paper materials, like using, magazine pages and book pages and I'm actually a retired librarian, so I love cutting up books and dismantling books and magazines. And I incorporating crochet into that and it just kind of hits something in my brain and I really got off on using, starting to use more recycled materials and consciously using recycled materials and using, not just in my collage work, but also in my crochet, using like cassette tape, audio cassette tape in my fiber work and video tape, I also use VHS tape. I use everything...



ORIGINAL STORY: EAST LANSING - Find out what one local woman is doing to create unique art on the next Community Connection.