Thursday, November 15, 2007

Blog 15th - Altered Books

Lots of pictures today. Here is the book that I started with: The Columbia Viking Desk Encyclopedia.First, I pasted the edges of the pages together with acrylic gel medium, and cut a niche into the papers. Well, before the first I perused the book and tore out pages with great drawings; I found pictures of architecture - things we have made - bridges, houses, arch and column styles. I cut these up and pasted them randomly over the inside of the end pages and inside the niche.Then, with the paper that I had cut from the book I rolled some beads. Ever done that? Over a knitting needle or toothpick roll evenly cut strips of paper until you get a bead of the heft that you like. You can use triangles and get a semblance of round-ish bead, but I wanted tubular beads.There are the strips with glue on the ends to hold the many strips together, and an experiment with blue acrylic paint and gel medium to see if I could make the blue transparent, and the beads lined up with their pearl and Swarovski crystal spacers. I had also pasted tiny pictures of the history of furniture styles, exampled in chairs over the ages, onto the beads - which I wanted to see through the blue paint.


Below, here, I had painted the beads and was drying them - and in the process invented an amazing Bead Drying Rack! I tucked a T-pin through the bead and stuck it into a piece of blue foam insulation board. (I usually paint fabric on these boards, so they are paint ridden anyway.) They let the beads spin around while I painted them, left them open to the air on all sides and I could move the board into a safe place for the hours that they would take to dry. I am so pleased.

Here is a picture of the back end paper - a view of the Pacific Ocean and its encircling land masses - the front end paper has a map of the Atlantic.And here is the end result!

You can go here to get to the Rockport, (Maine) Library website for the Out Of Bounds Altered Book Show http://www.rockport.lib.me.us/OutofBoundsAlteredBookProject.php or just come to the Rockport Opera House on Friday evening, Saturday or Sunday to see the show! See you there! R