Finished Book Cover

What fun! Messy, messy, tear a bit, glue a bit, slap a bit her, a bit there!

I used some of the page from the original book for the cover topped with silhouettes cut with my new digital craft cutter. I used a spare jeans button for the "door handle" and when the edges were dry, I sanded and inked them with Vintage Photo Distress Ink.

Reinvented Book Workshop

Now this was really my cup of tea!! Loved this idea and had a lot of fun collating the paper stocks with which to make my new pages.

I had so many thoughts and ideas about this that I couldn't sleep last night so at 1.30am, I got up and glued the binding to the spines of the signatures (or "packets" of pages, as our tutor calls them) so that I could the glue the original cover back on today and get these photo's up, lol.

So.... this is what I started with. An old Readers Digest condensed book that used to hold up one corner of Mum's old sofa:

I took out all the pages:

I then cut various cardstocks, papers and even an old aerial photo printed on film, to size. These were then folded in half, collated into signatures (or sets) of 3, 4 or 5 depending on the thickness of the paper used and then trimmed up neatly.

I used a mixture of heavily textured paper, water colour paper, black paper and printed papers. As you turn the pages you may well come across a page of random size or a pocket to pop in tags or notes. I love the unexpected element of this.
I may yet alter the cover because of course it no longer reflects the contents but I'm not sure yet how I want to do it.

I can see I will make more of these over time - they will make great gifts.

Altered Book Workshop

Gosh - it has been a while since I posted anything! Pretty slack, huh?

Last Saturday, as part of my birthday gift from Mum, I went to a workshop at Pataka Museum in Porirua to get some insight into altering old books.

I had a great time! The workshop was presented by two young artists and I have yet to finish the book but it's one of those projects that you can do in bits and pieces.

This is the book that I started with:



And this is a page I started before I remembered to take a photo:



It now looks like this:



Here are a couple more that I have done:





I used lots of paint and distress inks, masks and additional images. It took a couple of days to get the ink stains off my fingers, lol.

I'm going back tomorrow for a second workshop. This time we will "re-make" a book using the book original cover and making "new" pages for it with a variety of card and paper stocks.

Watch this space for the results :)