Feather Stitch is one of my favourite stitches, it is delicate and pretty and very, very versatile in the way it can be used…I didn’t get to do any stitching today but I did play with ideas in my visual Journal.
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last week when
Sharon celebrated 3 years of Blogging and commented that ‘The tradition on an anniversary is to link to your first post’, I was reminded that I had never finished transfereing my old blog entries when I moved to my loopylace blog…I had saved all the files before it disappeared from cyber space and yesturday when I was looking through those files to find the gardening entries to put in the garden journal that I have started and as it happens one thing leads to another and while I had the files open I started transfering them onto wordpress, for each entry I need to copy and paste the words, upload the images, put them into appropriate catagory and edit the time stamp, once I had the rhythm going I got through them much quicker than I would have expected. For those that didn’t read my blog then they are the Achive entries prior to Sep 2005.
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The toys on the pull out gave me the theme for this page, to which I initially stuck a few pictures of old toys…the next thing I did was paint over the white around the pictures and then I painted completely over the red car because it was to bright…I added more paint and stopped only when I realized that I was loosing the words on the page and I did want to keep some of them just visible in the background.
The next layer I added was the rocking horse, train, doll and ballerina which I found on a tissue box…I attached the ballerina with pieces of cardboard folded into a concertina so that they work like springs to make the ballerina dance above the page…I like how the horse and train blend in leaving the doll and the ballerina as focal points…The page was looking good but needed something else…
…I liked the books on the shelf beside the doll and decided to make a miniature book for the page…I used some of the page bits that I cut out to put in the drawers, I glued a piece of ribbon down the spine to reinforce it, I glued on front and back end pages which in turn were glued to the cover…To attach it, I cut 2 slots in the altered book page which the back cover of the mini book slip through.
I found the cover picture in a decoupage book that my mother found at an opp shop, it had some whole pages and a lot of part pages that had pictures cut form them as well as lots of already cut out pictures…while looking through what was there I found some tiny pictures that gave me an idea for how to make a second little book which turned out really cute, I stuck it to the bottom of the pull out so that it hides away between the pages until the tab is pulled…I also added a new tab which tells the reader to PULL on it…I like how interactive this page became.
You can see in the image below that I am having some trouble with the book coming breaking along the spine…I thought about trying to repair/patch it but after checking carefully that the pages were securely attached to the pages before and after so that they weren’t going to fall out I decided to leave it as it is because it adds to the old look of the page and sort of reminds the reader that it is a book.
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When I started the embellishments for this altered book I was at a bit of a loss because I had no theme to get me going…then on a visit to the hardware shop we checked out the craft section where some little wooden house shapes appealed to me, I didn’t know what I would do with them but bought a packet just because I liked them…Later when I was working on the book and had painted the back page blue it seamed natural to use the houses in the Shadow Box…I started by painting the bottom part of the page green.
I cut away a little more of the pages to recess the house on the left so that it didn’t add extra thickness to the book…I painted the clouds and extra trees as a background and made the tree from a twig, cotton wool, glue and paint…and then I couldn’t help myself, houses have to have Windows and Door Knobs…and a few spots of paint would look like Flower Gardens…
At this point I added the flecs of red to the green at the bottom of both pages……and while I am at it I could paint the doors…and the roofs…
Before I painted all the houses I decided to leave one unpainted as a sample of the houses before I painted them…Thought I could keep the sample house in one of the Matchbox Drawers…Ummm mini shadow boxes and one thought led to another until both the matchbox drawers were mini scenes.
The unpainted house is in the Drawer below…I thought that the scene needed something else… a look through my crazy quilting charms produced the little white car which was a blue plastic button before I got to it with modeling paints…
From what I have seen altered books are over the top decorated and the plan was to use stamps and addresses from old envelopes to further embellish the left side page but for once in my life I decided to keep it simple…I love the way the Match Box cars interact with the Page and think that the space on the left gives the scene a peaceful country feel…
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The altered book is to be a sampler so I want to use as many techniqes as I can in it…it has a pop up…the first image was before the final glaze and the second is the finished page.
 
And when I saw a picture using luggage tags in another book I thought umm I could do a pull out by attaching a card to a ribbon hidden between glued pages…the toy theme of the card I used has given me a general theme of old toys for that page and I have started a college for the page.
And on another page I have a window happening I have the frame cut with overhead projecter plastic for the window panes.
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Altered Books do take take time to do the initial preparation, I found that I had to paste pages together to get the look I wanted and then the pages have to be painted and it takes time for the glue and paint to dry.
Now that most of the initial glueing and painting has been done I am delighted with how it is looking and it is ready for the fun part of embellishing the pages.
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When I arrived at Jan’s she had already posted on her blog that I was coming for a creative play holiday.
Today working from the book ‘Altered books Workshop’ by Bev Brazelton we started making an altered book.
Thus far it has a match box set in as a draw and the hole cut for a shadow box.
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It has been an eventful couple of weeks…I have been working with Sharon, planning a Fund raiser for Katrina as Sharon says it is a project that has sparked our imaginations, it is a way that we can use our love for crazy quilting to help and I am looking forward to making a block and to seeing the blocks as they come in.
…And Today my son found and installed the network driver that my computer needed to be connected to Broadband and I have registered a domain name, lots of work in the weeks ahead to change my website and this blog over to the new server but it is so exciting…to celebrate I cleaned and reorganized my computer desk, below is are before and after photos, the new arrangement looks neater and is easier to work in.
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Last night the monthly meeting of my friendship group met at my place….Yesturday I spent the Entire day cleaning house and making it ready…we had a fun night with a lovely supper prepard by my son (if he hadn’t done it I would never have been ready on time )…
This morning I woke up to a clean house and some rare clear time…whilst decideing what to do I started poking about my studio and looking at some of the UFOs that I found when cleaning yesturday…and as I looked at them I heard Sharon in my head asking “Annie, where is your list of UFOs”, This has been an almost weekly question since the beginning of the year when I announced that for me this would be the Year of the UFOs… well sometimes life just done gets in the way of what we want to do…but today I was free, I started by emptying some shelves to stack them on and then I pulled the UFOs from boxes, of shelves and out of corners of the room…Thank you Sharon for continuing to ask me for the list…I think that I have got the majority of them together now and will type the list into the computer tomorrow.
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 To fit the tie onto this card I had to make it 3 dimensional so that it could be lifted up so that the saying can be read, it was the only way to fit it on and I joined 3 pieces of the offcuts to get the face at the top of the card so that I could put the tie on his neck….I embellished it with a few shirt buttons and the funny black bit at the bottom that looks a bit like a signature was meant to be a shoe lace.
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