Another hand-bound book........

Evening all,

I just had to share this one with you, ha ha ha! Never in a month of Sundays would I have ever thought that I would find a tampon box creatively inspiring!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Hey ho, stranger things happen at sea so they say!!
Goodness knows but I looked at the box and it was the perfect size for making a 'scrapbook' that I had in mind and was also the perfect proportions to try out a different stitching technique that I have been wanting to have a go at...........

The pages were made from scraps of various papers from my stash. Ha ha, I took the photo with the book the wrong way up but you can just about see the pockets I put in the cover using the spare box tabs, the cover itself was covered in some k&co papers!!

Sorry about the blurry pictures of the stitching (no excuse but my son was playing peepo with his big sister behind my legs at the time ha ha). The stitch is a mixture of pamphlet stitch and long stitch that I had seen on a Youtube demo, lol the demo kept freezing but I managed to work it out myself in the end.

And finally a view from the top........

Lots of lovely pages to hopefully hold some of my expanding collage fodder collection.................

Thank-you so much for popping by,

Big hugs x x x x

Altered Book, Lesson 10

Hello all,

hope everyone is well, if not a little frustrated at this changeable weather ha ha?
Elizabeth over at Altered Book Lover gave us an amazing lesson on the use of frames and asked us to have a 'play'.
I had so much fun playing with this and here are the three pages that I came up with........

The first page uses a plain background as I really wanted the images to be the focal point. Tee hee, saying that I still couldn't help myself and inked up and stamped around the edge of the page to create a border!!
I have adapted the frame technique that Elizabeth showed us and have used a small doily to curl up around the image rather than another page in my book........

For the second page I decided to recycle some of the pages that I had cut out of my book at the preparation stage. I used a craft template to cut a frame in a surplus page, this was then sprayed with chalk mist and sponged with distress ink to create a base. I then used the Stampotique large heart stamp and painted over this with an acrylic glaze. I was lucky enough to find a picture of a row of houses which were pasted on behind the frame - cliched as it may be, I am a firm believer that 'home is where the heart is'........

My final offering started as a bit of an experiment with acrylic ink.  I wanted to see how they would behave painted on top of each other as they are supposed to dry semi-translucent so that you can build up layers of colour?? I coated my page with white acrylic and once dry dropped on some red ink, swished it around the page with a damp brush (lol, needs to be done pretty quickly as the ink drys quite fast!) and let this dry. I then repeated the process with yellow and blue inks in turn.

The background is very random and not very refined ha ha but I was delighted to find that you do get other colours coming through where the inks sit on top of each other. 

The colours made me think of parrots and luckily I had a fab picture in my collage stash, this was then framed using some sticky backed paper tape that I coloured to match ish!!!!!!!!

Thank-you so much for popping by,

Hugs x 

Goddess

Hi there lovely people,

don't you just love it when you get a flash of inspiration followed by the warm fuzzy feeling in your tummy when you are able to make that flash come to life?
I had one of these today when I was looking at a 'play' page that I was originally planning to use as a background in my altered book somewhere!
Here is the result, I hope you like her?

Tee hee, I ran out of courage when it came to adding her other eye and admittedly her nose and the proportion is a bit off but other than that I love her.

Thank-you so much for popping by,

Hugs x x x x 

Altered Book Lesson 9

Hello everyone,

the lovely Elizabeth over at Altered Book Lover  asked us all to experiment with background techniques for this lesson. I have to admit to not having a lot of the products that Elizabeth showcased for her amazing technique tutorials but I didn't let this stop me from playing ha ha.
I decided to pick out a few products from my stash and also raided my kitchen tee hee, hence followed some improvisation and severe plumbing of the depths of my memory!!. The results were varied to say the least........

The first sheet was created using a base watercolour wash, I then scrunched up some newspaper and ragged on some acrylic paint to create some texture, subtle maybe but I really liked the result -

The second sheet was created by saturating the paper with water and dripping on some distress re-inker and some acrylic ink, not too happy with this one but am sure I can do something with it in my book somewhere!!!!!!!! I did love the way the acrylic ink spread though........

For the third sheet I decided to stick with the acrylic ink but wanted to see how it would behave on top of another watercolour wash, I really liked how this one turned out........

Tee hee, most people choose to blot their soggy pages with kitchen roll before they start to dry them but a lot of the time I prefer not to do this and I end up spending ages chasing drips around my page with the heat-gun, I love doing this as you never really know how it's going to turn out until you've stopped chasing the drips and taken a step back.  I love the way you end up with streaks and gradients of the same colour (lol, I hope that makes sense??)

My fourth page was done on a larger sheet of watercolour paper. I saturated it with water again and used the same approach as sheet three but this time I wanted to try using some salt (ha ha, this is where my brain started hurting after the plumbing of the memory!!!) to see if it would draw the colour as I have read that it should?? The result was 'different' to say the least and I have to admit that I have no understanding of what or why!! Any ideas peeps??............

Admittedly I lost patience a little and started using the heat-gun to dry the sheet, this is probably why the salt was not entirely successful? Ha ha ha, when I looked at it sideways all I could see were the makings of 2 strange space alien thingys that I could bring to life with lots of doodling, lol my mind works in strange ways but I'm probably going to give it a go at some point!!!

My final sheet started as a test of a new spray ink I had indulged in!! This is also not really to Elizabeth's brief  but I am hoping to incorporate it into my book somehow.  I think this could be classed as a 'work in progress' as I think it could still do with a little more oomph!!

I started by masking off a grid and spraying Memories orange juice mist, this was then masked and the remaining white space was sprayed with an acrylic ink wash I made up myself. I then decided to let rip with some Stampotique, Acey Deucy, My Minds Eye, Papermania and various other stamps to build up layers. The DI's came out too and were used through and over various masks and sequin waste. Lots of doodling followed and here you go........

Blimey, my apologies for the length of the post but I had so much fun playing that I wanted to share it all.

Did you make it through without dozing off tee hee????????

If you did, thank-you so so much for visiting, I really appreciate everyone's time and thoughts.

Hugs from Thundery Cornwall

xx

Feeling Brave.........

Hi peeps,

goodness I must be feeling really brave today (or maybe stupid lol!!) and decided to go for it and bare my soul in a way by sharing something that I've actually drawn myself.
It has been over 20 years since I have tried to draw anything from a serious point of view but I felt very inspired by an article by Anna Bjorklund in a recent Scrap365 issue.
Anna very clearly explains how to draw faces so I had a go............

Apologies for the lack of colour but I am planning on jazzing up a printed copy and want to keep the original as it is.  I really did sit there wondering who she was when I had finished as she looks so sad!!

Hey ho - just to brighten the post I wanted to share another journal page too. This one is from my altered book journal (no relation to my Altered Book course book tee hee)......

I have used my trusty chalk sprays for the background, the fab Tim Holtz wings have been embossed using distress embossing powder and edged with a red gel pen, the wellies were cut from a sunday supplement, the border was done with a docrafts star stamp and doodled on with metallic pens.  Ha ha, the wording is my own, can you tell by how wonky it is!!!!!!!

Thank-you so much for taking a peek.

Big hugs x