Altered Book Project . . . continued

This is an amazing learning experience. I have discovered one of the most important things to do is rip out pages! Books are not really designed to have dimensional objects in them. So to accommodate the thickness of ribbon, brads, etc, you really need to get rid of a lot of paper. All the pages I painted and showed in my previous altered book post had to be removed, tho I kept them and will use them either in this project or another.

Here are the second pages in my altered book:

For these pages, I used gesso as a kind of whitewash over the green glaze. Then I used the gesso again over some of the images and elements. The chicken wire is part of a Stampington & Co set called Bird Santuary. I worked on these two pages before gluing them to the following pages. I knew I wanted to add brads and wanted to enclose the brads. It works better for hiding the back side of brads, but the gluing does not go as easily. If you have to see something before you know it's right, then I highly recommend a restickable glue stick. A little like post-it notes, it allows you to place your items together without affixing them permanently.

Mary is working on her own book and it is wonderful. I love the soft quality to her backgrounds. I'm glad we decided not to have a theme, cuz I'm finding each new page seems to call forth a different story. It will be interesting to see if at the end there is something unifed about the book. Will I say, "Oh, that was what I was going for."

~Marilee