The Birth of an Altered Book

I am taking Elizabeth's online class for making an altered book... a thing I wanted to do for so long and not quite had the courage or the knowledge or the determination to 'destroy' a book.  See... I am old school (as opposed to just plain old) and scribbling in books, tearing pages out of books and generally not being kind to books is a big no-no... so I knew I would have a few moments of trepidation and went forth to the thrift store to get a book... which isn't so bad really, because if it is in the thrift store it is already unloved and unwanted right?  I picked a few up that I hoped would survive the Elizabeth test of AB-ness... which involved inspecting it for how it was made and bending the spine back on itself as though it were a limbo dancer on crack...
I chose a dictionary... a very fat dictionary and I think it passed all the spot checks including the spine bending thing.

but it didn't have a nice material cover and it was exceedingly shiny... so I thought I would give it a quick sand down to see if that helped... and I was a bit vigorous with the sanding on the spine bit where the covers are attached... but hey ho... Elizabeth said that she Gesso's her covers as they get pretty messy whilst the altering of the inside goes on... but she also said that we didn't need to use Gesso and cheap paint would do... 

So I followed the class and prepped the pages... which involved removing a big heap of them!! Eeek... but it's ok, there are still more than enough left in the book!!

See?  Plenty left to play with and I even remembered to band off the niche section at the back!! (In fact, if I have to do something on all those pages I'm thinking another few hundred need to be removed because otherwise I am going to be 90 before the darn thing is finished...

and the paint was there and the book was there... so I painted it.  Doesn't look very pretty does it?  

So I gave it another coat with the hope that it would become something I would like to work in... but it didn't...

a coat of black paint didn't improve things that much... and it was obvious that my over zealous sanding had compromised the fold of the covers.... hmmmm... no problem... on a shelf high above my head was a box with 7Gypsies book binding tape in it!!

Would you look at that... it looks like a real book!! ;)

and the black paint was on my desk... and the tissue paper was handy... so I had a little play...

then I thought it would look cool if it had studs all around the edge...

and then I distresses the cover with copper and gold inks and weathered the studs...

and gave it a fine glitter glue coat to protect while I worked in it...

and the box of 7Gypsies stuff was still sitting near the desk so I added an escutcheon and door knob... and a title for the theme of my book...

Yep, Elizabeth is gonna wrap my knuckles hard with a wooden ruler... was only supposed to prep the inside... but I couldn't work in a book with an ugly cover... it wouldn't help with my mojo... I'll try and keep it as clean as I can... ;)