The Tudor Queens Altered Book

Yesterday my Altered Art group met and we shared our work from the first round of our Round Robin. This past month I have been working on a spread about Queen Elizabeth I,in a book with the Tudor Queens as it's theme. I was the first artist to work in this book, so naturally I chose Elizabeth! I had great fun with this project and I managed to learn quite a bit as well!!

I did two full spreads in this book. And I decided immediately that somehow I wanted to incorporate an Elizabethan collar in my work, I just wasn't sure how that would fit in with everything else.

For this first page, I used a piece of silk brocade fabric for the background and I sewed on the pearls and gold trim. I stubled upon a wonderful little book about English Royaltyat Goodwill and it bacame the source for many of my images. How lucky can you get???

The second spread includes some crushed velvet bias ribbon that I had in my stash, as well as other bits and pieces. I came across the very old postage stamps and the definitions of Elizabeth and Elizabethan in an old Junior Dictionary. I had great fun with the little lace medallion. I beaded it up with little crystal seed beads, to add a bit of sparkle.

This next picture shows a close view of the collar that I created from watercolor paper. The original piece was twice as long, but I soon realized that it would be far too bulky for the book. I sewed the whole thing together as I wanted it to be very sturdy and it was much simpler to sew that lace on rather than glueing it to the paper edge. The button on the outside of the collar is made from polymer clay. I made a mold of an actual vintage button and used that mold to make the clay replica. I highlighted the details of the button with Pearl-Ex powders. Inside each of the pockets I put tags, each one different.

Each tag was madeusing a different image and on the reverse side , I wrote out information about Elizabeth and england during the time of her reign.

More tags.

The owner of this book was extremely pleased with the work that I contributed to her book. I was very pleased as the whole project turned out better than I had anticipated!!! I just love it when it all works out this way !!!!!