Big Book Project

I have been holding off on sharing this commissioned book project till after the holidays. A good friend from my previous home in Stillwater, OK, asked me to create a Journal/Book for her cousin for Christmas. I am a friend of the cousin as our tow boys were in Scouts and school together. I was given a list of things that I might consider including and set on my task. The book was delivered and it drew raves!! I was so excited to get such a response. I have yet to hear how the gift was received but I trust that all is well- No News is Good News, after all!
I am going to post a bunch of pictures with very little chatter. The covers will be first and if anyone has any questions be sure to leave me a comment or shoot me an e-mail and I will be glad to share!!!

I used two covers from a discarded book for the supports and covered them with a first layer of denim form an old pair of jeans. Then I collaged the denim with various fabrics most of which I designed myself. (sun prints, clean up rags,) Any of the other fabrics used were reclaimed from my fabric scraps or repurposed thrift store finds.
I stitched int he fabric covered signatures with linen thread and secured them to the spine with my hand made beads.
Inside front cover.

random pocket page on the right

pocket made with security envelope (on the right)

I am gathering more materials daily and I plan to make several more of these journals in the near future! The biggest issue that I had with creating this piece was knowing when to stop adding special touches!! Oh yes, and then when it came time to send it out into the world, I really wanted to keep this one but convinced myself that I had plenty of supplies to make many more!!!

I hope that everyone is able to squeeze in a tiny bit of time to be creative every day in 2012~~~

Happy New Year!!

Collage Papers

After my recent adventures with dying fabrics, I have been consumed with color!! I have been feeling the need to play and create colored papers and collage with the thought that I would create small journals to sell during the holiday season. You see, there is a method to my madness, I am thinking and working ahead to create some stock for the upcoming holidays while following my muse and having fun!! The planets don't align for me very often so when they do I MUST take full advantage!!
I wanted to ahve texture and lots of color but make things realtively simple. So I chose to start with gesso resist and acrylic paints. I cranked the above papers out in a couple of hours - these are the best ones, in my opinion but all will be used in some fashion.
Here are some tighter shots. (Left click on any picture to get a look at the details!)

This next piece is the large sheet of paper that I used to protect my work surface! I used sktech paper from a big pad for all of these. I just love the Serendipity of this sheet!!!

So I decided taht I would create another set of papers with simple bright color washes to complement the gesso resist papers and I would stitch the two sets of papers together n the sewing machine. This way I could avoid bubbling papers and not get everything all wet with glues. Plus the stitching would add more fabulous texture to each set of pages.

Next I had to think about covers for my little journals. I took some heavy watercolor paper and did some paint scraping and sponge work to come up with these two cover sheets.

All that I did was scrape paint over the surface using an old gift card. ( A favorite tool!)
For this next sheet it was all about color and a small sponge!

I found a sheet of collaged text that I had created awhile back and took the gift card and paint to it as well. There is a glare on this shot as the last layer that I added was a metallic blue. If you click on any of the pictures you can see all of the details, especially on this one. I will be able to get several covers from this one sheet.

Once I had painted up a storm, I took the frilled edges off of the full sheets of paper and saved them , of course!! Then I tore all of the sheets down to size and stitched a bunch of them together to create packs of pages with three sheets to each signature. (More on this aspect in a later post.)
After a round of stitching, I started to gather everything up and unearthed the bag of frill edges that I had put aside. I threw together a quick collage with the left over bits and this will become a cover as well. I think of all of the thigns that I created in this paint session, this piece is my favorite!!


So now I have lots of great pages all stitched for signatures, a bunch of painted papers yet to be torn and several really fun and different covers all ready to put together into journals. I have more work to do and I will share the finished journals with you very soon!!
have a great day!
Art On!!!!