Something that I always loved about my family is the passion for art and craft we have. My mom was my figure into making me enjoy and appreciate art, from dance classes, piano lessons, to the history of paintings I always enjoyed learning and spending time with her. Later I started realizing my favorite path or field in part, intervening clothes. I started painting my own jeans, cutting and recycling old clothes into new ones, making Halloween costumes for my sister from my old clothes, to even having my friends give me their own jeans and asking me to paint them. This type of art has always been my favorite; until I found this world of decorating your room with handmade products.

I have always been a fan of decorating, as my mom is as well, she taught me how to fill a space with small details that create big impacts. Therefore, since last year I moved into my new apartment and as my mom was not there with me I had to decorate it by myself. As a part of growing up, my mom really wanted to help me build my new apartment but she needed me to complete it on my own. Weeks go by and my roommate and I are building our living room together, but even though the basic pieces of a living room where already there, we still needed the small details to make a difference. In my house back in Argentina, even though none of my family members such as my dad, mom or sister smoke, we always had an ashtray in our living room prepared for when my grandma or any smoker visitor came to the house. Nevertheless, the ashtray was not only for smoking, we started seeing the ashtray as a cool/funky object to decorate and elevate our living room. That is when I realized that I needed to find or make a cool ashtray for my new home.

Back to when I started discovering this new world of handmade products, I decided to make my first ashtray with resin at my house. As my living room has some tones of grey and black I decided to play with the resin and make a total black ashtray. As this was my first one, I did not want to start already with heavy designs or tricks as I did not know how to use resin at all. I started to perfect the technique and decided it was time to show the world how interesting and cool this products could be. Something I always want to point out it is the fact that you do not need to smoke in order to have an ashtray in your house. This products can add a lot of elegance or fun to a room without the need of being used as what they are “made for”. In my case I love having an ashtray for whenever a friend that smokes visits the house; nevertheless in the past months I have been using it to save my rings. I love wearing rings but I always loose them, so I started giving that use to the ashtray and now I know that if I cannot find a ring, is probably in the ashtray.

I hope people can find more uses and adjust ashtrays for whatever they want to use it for in their day to day. I love making art every day and learning new ways to take it with me wherever I go.