It's Written in the Cards

Mari's "Double, Double, Toil & Trouble" book gave me the perfect opportunity to do a spread with Tarot cards.  I have long been intrigued by the Tarot.  I don't know much about them but I love all the beautiful decks of Tarot cards.  

For this spread, I used Inka Gold to color my background pages.  Then I took images of Tarot cards from a book I found on Tarot.  I reduced the images and ran them off on cardstock.  I cut out four sets of the Major Arcana to use in this spread.  I thought this simple pop-up format would be a fun way to show off all of the different designs.  There are 22 in the Major Arcana alone!  I attached the cards with foam core mounting squares to give it even more of a 3-D effect.  My technique and materials are included on the back side of the pop-up.

Weathered Beauty

Talk about serendipity!  My next hybrid chunky page was for Su and her theme was Weathered Beauty.  Can you guess what I did?  Since I was already boiling books, I stuck a few more remnants into the pot thinking I would be able to use something for Su's chunky page.

I selected one 4 x 4 panel and wanted to create a Haiku poem for my page.  I am not a huge poetry person, but I started out by writing short phrases relating to weathered beauty.  Elegant decay, discarded, rotting, abandoned...In the end, I came up with two poems that I liked, but this one suited Su's theme the best:

Rotting and exposed

Revealing nature's beauty

The magic unfolds

I printed my Haiku poem onto vellum and embellished it with a twig I found on my morning walk.  I used wire to attach the poem to a smaller 3 x 3 panel.  I then used foam mounts to place the 3 x 3 onto the 4 x 4 to complete my chunky page for Su.   I chose not to cover the leaf impression you see on the back of the page.  Boiling books is a lot like Christmas.  You never know what you are going to get until after the boiling is done and you open up the pages!

Arting with Mom

My Mom and I spent a day last week making art!  Our day together gave me the opportunity to finally tackle one of projects I had been meaning to do for the longest time.  She is an avid water color painter and once upon a time, she had made these cute little purse-shaped covers from a few of her discarded water color paintings.  I thought that they would make a nice housing for a "pocket" book (no pun intended).  Still in my napkin transfer mode, I gathered some beautiful autumn colored napkins to match the purse template you see here.  

I covered 8 business sized envelopes with the napkins to create the 16 pocket book and glued it into the purse.  We made one for her and one for me.

Mom also likes to make tags out of her water color scraps, so we picked out a few tags and slipped them into our little tag books!

Mom had wanted me to teach her how to make boiled books, so that was our next project.  I had gathered some plant material from my neighborhood before heading over to her house.  We spent time sorting through the leaves and flowers trying to decide what to use for our boiled books.  I had pre-cut several "meandering" books from water color paper.  I also made a few more with some of Mom's scraps.  Note: making boiled books is quite a production so when you decide to make them, make several at a time!

Here are some of the books we made that afternoon.

The Original Bad Girl

The Altered Ladies' Second AB RR is about to begin.  We have a group of 13 players, including some new faces!  Everyone has selected their books, chosen their themes and the rotation will officially get underway this weekend!

It was downright painful deciding on a theme for my book!  I initially thought I was going to do "Rock Paper Scissors," but that turned out to be a dud of a theme for me.  Then I had this other fabulous idea, but decided to save it for when I had more time to prepare my book for that theme.  In the end, I picked up a copy of Stieg Larsson's "The Girl Who Kicked The Hornet's Nest" and immediately, the theme "Bad Girls" came to mind.  The more I thought about bad girls, the more I liked this theme.

I created a prompt page on the inside front cover.  I painted the background with gray acrylic paint and then used a brick pattern rubber stamp to build my brick wall.  I was envisioning a wall full of graffiti and a collection of posters.  I listed my prompts on posters I made and placed them on my wall.

My sign-in page is located on the back inside cover.  It mimics the graffiti wall on the front inside cover.

How could I resist featuring Eve and the Garden of Eden for my initial spread?  After all, she is the original Bad Girl!  I used a napkin transfer for my background.

I cut out (free hand) a serpent using this snake print duct tape.  His eyes are black swarovski crystals.  The apple is from a book jacket I had.

Eve is an image that I printed out onto tissue paper.  I had to glue a few additional sheets of plain white tissue behind the image so that she would not disappear completely into the background.  For the longest time, I felt that this page was missing something, but I didn't know what it was--until I was shopping in my favorite thrift store and saw a woman who had grabbed a handful of artificial ivy vines!  At that moment, I knew I had to get my hands on some of that ivy, but the woman was going to buy it all!  My girlfriend and I scoured the store and found several other types of artificial plants before we finally spotted a small bunch of ivy that the woman had apparently overlooked!  The size of these ivy leaves was perfect for my spread.  I used a vine to frame Eve in the Garden of Eden.  I had to peel apart the pages I had already glued together, but now my spread was complete.

I created a pocket behind the left side of the page to hold a card that explains my technique and the materials I used.

Definitions

I absolutely LOVE how this spread turned out!  (I think Pam's gonna like it too!)  Pam's theme is "Definitions" and her book is a dictionary.  There are several parts to it, so the artists in this AB RR were given the "d," "f" and "i" sections to alter.

I had stumbled across a beautiful definition of the word "Inspiration" awhile back: "Inspiration: Revelation a divine influence arouses feelings awakening creative vision."  I tucked it away from safekeeping thinking I would have the opportunity to use it in a project one day.  Pam's book provided me with the perfect opportunity to bust it out--especially since "inspiration" was included in the sections we had been given to work in and, nobody had taken it yet!

I had also found these two head images in a magazine last year and kept them knowing that I would be able to use them in a future spread.  This was it!  I liked the idea of putting them face-to-face (more like nose-to-nose).  Then I cut a window in the head on the left to reveal the definition of inspiration in the dictionary.  The definition on the dictionary page (in the box behind her mouth) could not have been more perfectly centered!  I used a packing tape transfer for the two heads.  

To highlight the definition that I found, I die cut letters (did you know there are 12 i's and 12 e's?) and colored them with Distress Stain (red brick) so they would be better visualized.  I glued them down along the outline of the heads.

Once in awhile, a spread comes together rather effortlessly.  Here is an example of how previously "saved" elements magically came together and allowed me to create this beautifully "inspiring" spread.

A (Very) Loosely Interpreted Self-Portrait

So I was tasked with doing a self-portrait chunky page for Hope this month...I gotta tell you, I am NOT my favorite subject!  Unlike the other players, I was determined NOT to be so literal and use an image of myself to create my self-portrait.  But, what to do, what to do?

I had been playing around with napkin transfers for an AB I was preparing for another RR and found myself drawn to an unusual Halloween themed napkin I had in my stash:  a burning Jack-O-Lantern.  I liked the flames.  I started to tear the napkin into long strips and began gluing them down onto a 4" x 4" piece of watercolor paper.  Fire, burning...They say the eyes are the windows to one's soul, so I decided to use a transparency of an eye as an overlay and came up with this very loose interpretation of "self-portrait."

Boiled Books...Round Two

I have found boiling books to be a relaxing way to spend a lazy afternoon.  Here is how I spent a recent Sunday afternoon.