"Come Into the Garden" Altered Book Spread

This altered book spread is for a fellow member of my altered arts group. Our group meets once a month and we exchange books when we see each other. At that time, we give presentations of our work, to the whole group. It is such fun to see what everyone has done and to see the reaction of the owner of the book that I have been working in for that month.

The theme of the book that I was to work in for this month was "Favorite Things". One of my favorite things has got to be gardening. I love digging in the earth and watching things grow and watching all of the natural fauna that comes to our yard when we lay out our organic feast of nectars and pollens. Of course we also get lots of birds because we don't use any poisons to kill the bugs. The Carolina Wrens and the bats do just fine with those details! See! Can you tell that I love to garden?

The background papers used on this side of the spread is the green that I showed in a previous post. I stitched down the felt leaves and the Ric-Rac trim stems and then glued on the felt flowers and hand sewed the beaded stamens. I am very pleased with this page. There is some glae on all of the following pages as I used some metallic paints in all of my work. In real life the papers are extremly rich looking.

FOr the pockets on this page, I glued several book pages together then ripped off the corners and then applied the paint in layers , scrapping the paint off with an old credit card. Then I simply punched small hole through all of the pages and inserted the little flower brads to hold everything together.

There has been a developing genral them in this round robin. One of the artist participants decided that she would make a book within hwer book. Other artists have picked up on this idea on their own and last month almost each book had a minibook contained somewhere with in the layout. My mini-book, for last months spread was the Elizabethan Ruff, shown in a previous post. My intention for at least one of the pockets in the garden spread ,was that it would hold a mini book made from seed packets. Each seed packet would hold a tag with a gardening quote and one of my personal garden photos.

Here is a picture of my first piano hinge book. the spine is made of painted bamboo cooking skewers that are lashed together with nylon thread at both the top and the bottom.

The book pages swing open quite easily on the thick paper hinges that are attatched to the packets with more floral brads.

The tags were covered with text pages from an old Horticultural Dictionary on one side and with more of the green scrapped paint paper on the other.

All of the pictures on the tags were photos that I took in my garden in Oklahoma. (One of the few things that I miss about Oklahoma is my collection of fragrant antique roses.)

The last shot is the green side of the tags with the gardening quotes. One of them reads , "You know that you are a gardener if you find compost a fascinating subject.", another one states "Gardening is the art that uses flowers and plants as paint and the soil and sky as canvas." Elizabeth Murray