Reusing Metal Shingles

This is a screen I made a few years ago. Our church was having the roof redone, and they had to take off all the old layers of shingles, one layer was the original metal shingles in a kind of fish head design. They were painted green evidently, I liked the patina of the old paint and the way they had aged. So, I did some dumpster-diving, and saved a few hundred of them.

I cut them to fit into this photo frame screen that I bought on sale at a discount store. I sprayed clear polyurethane on them to prevent the paint from peeling further, inserted them in the spaces... and voila! This is now my daughter's screen, a gift to her.

I've done other things with the old metal shingles too. I've used them as backgrounds in frames and shadow boxes, like these.....One is pretty plain, it has a tin box I found at Good Will, and I hung a crystal from an old lamp inside it. I like the big frame and the depth of it (I found 3 of these frames at Good Will a year or so ago and had been waiting to use them for some project.)

The other one pictured here is of my baptism as a baby, at the church I now work at. It has pictures of one of the stain glass windows and of the church from the early 1900's.