Altered Book Homework... week 4

This week was all about glue and the sheer numbers and varieties out there... and honestly... if you ever have a question about a certain glue just go to Elizabeth's lesson for this week and you will have your answer!!  I don't have a heap of different glues like Elizabeth does... it's one of those things that removal companies do not like to pack and ship from continent to continent, so what is on my desk is what I have bought here or smuggled into the country... because one thing you learn is that glue is not cheap.... nope, not cheap at all!!  

So the first page was using a glue stick... oddly, I was fully expecting this to be a big mess but as it happens it ended up my favourite glue for pasting large areas together!  I made a little pocket out of one of the pages that I torn out previously and used this for keeping the tag safe.

The tag has the details of the type of glue and how I applied it.

This page used Aleens Tacky Glue - it is thick and heavy and I wouldn't use it again for this particular job.

Tag with description.

Mod Pedge is my go to glue for many things and I actually like it but for large areas like this it didn't do very well... the page was wrinkled and Mod Podge smells bad.... :(

 I have it in matt, gloss and a shimmer but it didn't beat the glue stick for doing an entire page.

This page was glued with Gel Medium... and though I have had it for a while I was not sure how to use it, it goes on so smoothly it is lovely, and I mixed some gold paint with it to go on the front of the pages and it gives a fabby effect... I think I would use it for decorative purposes rather than large gluing jobs... the costs would be prohibitive and the pages dry a bit wrinkled.

Tag with description for the Gel medium.

Gesso... yep, Elizabeth made us use Gesso to glue the pages together!!  First of all, at midnight last night I was playing 'hunt the gesso'... I knew I had some, but it wasn't where I thought it should be... in fact it had disappeared and I took the scrap room apart looking for it... it was one of the 'smuggled' in things as it still has a £8.50 price tag on it!!  

So to my surprise, it did indeed glue the pages together... but left wrinkles and a very hard page.

So I had this huge mess going on... and decided that I would have a play with coffee... it took a couple of coats of coffee to give this colour and I made a couple of 'love' letters from copy paper and love the effect I got, the paper dries very crackly and brittle... like very old paper... I needed to do this to get over the stress of making a mess on lots of pages... but now I have lots of time to decorate them and hopefully pretty them up a bit!!

this is a close up of the letter...

it looks like a really old letter... I had to sand the folds to make it look old and well-read.

Altered Book Class - The Niche!!

The Apothecary Shoppe Window

This week's class with Elizabeth was to get the niche cut out of books and decorated and once I had located the clamps the fun began!!  Thank goodness for Elizabeth's very detailed instructions and photographs, this was a lot easier than I had first anticipated!  OK... the fact that I chose to have quite a substantial niche proved to be pretty hard on the wrists but I knew which word (Words being my theme for my altered book) I had chosen for this and I had all those wee bottles so it was just a matter of making the hole deep enough for them to fit!!

I used 7Gypsies labels for all the bottles so they have fabulous labels with words like Elixer of Opium, Chloroform Liniment and Arsenic Poison.

The definition underneath reads:

apothecary: N. the physician's accomplice, undertaker's benefactor and 

grave worm's provider.

when Jove sent blessings to all men that are,

and mercury conveyed them in a jar,

that friend of tricksters introduced by stealth

disease for the apothecary's health

whose gratitude impelled him to proclaim:

'my deadliest drug shall bear my patron's name!'

from Ambrose Bierce Devil's Dictionary.

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... ;)