At her first art show in April 2004, Charron Andrews didn’t even consider trying to sell any of her mixed-media artworks.

“Every one I would make I would think, ‘I would never make that again, so I can’t let it go,’” Andrews said.

Even if she had been able to bear to part with any of her pieces, there was the issue of how to price them.

“It is all made out of trash, so it becomes harder then for me to say how much it would be worth,” Andrews said. “It was all stuff that was thrown away to begin with.”

But people who saw her work fell in love with it, and they asked her to part with it. She relented, and now offers many of her pieces for purchase — although she lets her husband set the prices.

A show of Andrews’ work, “Shrines, Masks, and Assemblages,” opened Tuesday at Cup A Joe Coffee Shop, 1129 Weaver Dairy Road, and will remain on display through April. A reception will be held Friday from 6 to 8 p.m.

Until about five years ago, Andrews didn’t consider herself to have an artistic bone in her body. But her friend Marki Watson would occasionally invite several friends to meet so she could try out art projects she wanted to use with her students at the Duke School or at the Church of Reconciliation, where she was the children’s education leader.

One day Watson got the group together to make assemblages, attaching various small objects to foam board triptychs that served as the “canvas.”

Andrews brought hers home and kept adding little things it. Then she began making more and found she could not stop.

“I don’t know exactly why,” she said. “One thing that happened was that I had a lot of stress in my life, and I found that making those occupied myself. It was working through whatever was troubling for me.”

She said creating the artwork seemed to open up new parts of her brain. Something about the act of assembling collections of outwardly unrelated objects into meaningful patterns helped her think more clearly.

“I could make harmony out of these seemingly chaotic things, because often I would start off and think, ‘How am I going to do this?’ and it would just kind of happen,” Andrews said.

Almost anything can serve as material for artwork in Andrews’ hands — buttons, bottle caps, discarded scraps of metal or other material, you name it. She scours local thrift shops and the recycling shed at the landfill for castoffs. She used to go “Dumpster diving,” often to great success, before that practice was banned.

Paints and gel medium, which she uses to attach things to the surface of the artwork, are the only new materials she purchases.

Andrews’ home is filled with her works, large and small, and it was with great pleasure that I got the opportunity to examine each one. Her first functional piece is a huge dresser adorned with ornate doorknobs she found at the landfill. Another, a wooden box divided into compartments, has many components attached to its surface, among them a scapular card, which Andrews explained is a religious item worn by Catholics. She found it in a restaurant parking lot in the mountains.

She created another piece on the underside of a discarded metal ironing board she saw while driving around Chapel Hill one day.

While her artistic urges didn’t appear until a few years ago, this practice of recycling and reuse was a part of Andrews’ childhood growing up in a working class neighborhood in Detroit. Andrews said everyone practiced “alley picking,” but she was a little bit more into it than most.

“I would know when the trash pick-up was and I would definitely know when there was someone moving,” Andrews said. “The most exciting thing I ever found was this box when I was eight or nine. It was of girls’ dresses like gowns. Not quite the neighborhood where there were parties you’d wear something like that.”

She shared the dresses, which had hoops sewn into them, with the all the girls in the neighborhood. “It was magical,” Andrews said.

One of the pieces in the Cup A Joe show, “Mike’s New Home,” won’t be for sale. It is the first piece she has created at someone’s request; Mike, a friend of hers, was moving into his own apartment and asked her for some art for his walls. Andrews asked Mike to give her something to use as a starting point. His dad gave her a piece of white, laminated pressed wood that had been outside waiting to go to the trash. The wood came from a bookshelf that had belonged to Mike’s uncle, who had died years ago.

“That piece of wood wasn’t exactly inspiring but I took it home and covered it with fabric from an old shirt of mine,” she said. “Then I just started painting around on it and made a house shape. I had a picture of Mike on my kitchen windowsill for years, so at some point I decided to use that. Other things you might be able to identify are photo negatives, wrapping paper, tissue paper, beads, bottle caps, a watchband, and a book spine. All of these things were discarded one way or another.”

Using another board from the discarded bookshelf, she made a piece for Mike’s brother Matt, which will also be in the show.

Andrews recently had a show at the Women’s Health Information Center Gallery at the N.C. Women’s Hospital.

“It was very fun,” said Julie Sweedler, manager of the center and its gallery. “People loved her work. You can stand in front of her pieces for a long time and continue to see things. She has so many little treasures in every piece.”

Andrews has taken two art classes since she began creating. One was a workshop at a Richmond art museum, called “Making Art Out of Things You Find on the Street.” Most of the participants were seasoned artists and they talked a lot about shows they were having. Andrews, who had not at that point had a public showing, came home and decided she too would try to show her work.

The second class was a painting class with longtime ArtsCenter instructor Jane Filer. Andrews loved Filer, who imparted to her that artwork doesn’t have to be about precision.

“I can do what I want, is what I took away from her,” Andrews said.

For those who can’t make it to Cup A Joe or want to see more of Andrews work, she will have an exhibition called “Works Inspired by the Feminine Divine” during May at the Church of Reconciliation parish house, 110 N. Elliott Road.

Deborah R. Meyer can be contacted at 942-3252 or eloise@nando.com.