Thrifty Thursday: Altered Book Project

As part of my Thrifty Thursday series, I've decided to alter a book I bought at the local used bookstore. It's called Plains Song by Wright Morris.

I haven't read it, and now that I've prepared it for altering I won't be able to (not this copy anyway) as you will soon understand. But I didn't buy it to read it, I bought it specifically for the purpose of alteration. Now, there are two important things to look for when purchasing a book to alter. First of all, it has to have a hard cover, otherwise it won't stand up to all the fun things you'll be putting it through. Second, it really should have stitched signatures, as opposed to glued signatures.

I'm not sure how well you can see it here, but pages have been grouped together - these are known as "signatures" - and those groups have been sewn together onto a binding strip. This is very important when it comes to the first (and really only major) step in preparing the book to be altered:  tearing out pages. If the signatures were glued together, when you start to tear some out, the whole book could fall apart. You should be able to tell when you're holding it in your hands, and most older books were stitched as that was the only available method; the downside to this being older books tend to cost more. Trust me though, it's worth the extra in the long run!

Here you can see I tore out a page or two; I chose to leave the black and white photos that appear at the beginning of the chapters just in case I want to use them.

There are no rules, that I'm aware of, as far as how many pages to remove. I like even numbers, so I try to leave an even number of pages, and tear out about a third of the book. The more you remove, the more room you will have to give your layouts dimension and interaction. You can always start small and remove more as you need the room.

I would like to finish at least one page a week, although at that rate it will take me over a year to finish the entire book, so I'll probably do more than one. I will be trying out different techniques, mediums, etc, and sharing photos and writing about some of my favorites as part of this series. When the entire book is full I'm going to give it to a friend, but I'm not going to tell you who that friend is until after they've received it. Surprises are fun! Especially homemade ones!

Weekly Wednesday #22: Patchwork Body

As part of this new structure experiment, I've decided to provide both Art Challenge Weekly prompt cards in one post, now known as "Weekly Wednesday". The previous posts in this series can be found under the labels "wednesday prompt" and "saturday prompt", and will also be listed under the "Art Challenge" tab on the Home page.

The main reason I decided to combine them is to make it work with my alliteration (Weekly Wednesday), but also because I know most of you who are following this challenge and actually using the prompts probably won't be doing them twice a week, one at a time. I will still try to use the blue deck as my first layer, and the red deck as my next, and will write about the blue deck card first, red second, in each of these posts from now on. As I've always said, this is all about individual creativity, so however you want to participate is up to you. Since I haven't gotten much feedback on the process, I made an executive decision about what works for me. I would still love to hear about and see what you're working on, though, and will be having some fun giveaways this summer for anyone who shares.

Ok, now that the business side of things is taken care of, let's get to this week's prompts. I actually have an idea for these already:

The first prompt is patchwork. Webster tells us that patchwork is "something composed of miscellaneous or incongrous parts; hodgepodge," and another source defines it as "pieced work." Both work well for our purposes (and let's be honest, hodgepodge is just a fun word to say!), and will hopefully inspire several great ideas right off. On the card, I made a "pieced" owl using three different papers, then drew on the stitching lines for depth and interest. I have an idea for using this particular little guy on a larger scale, and will be sharing that when it's finished. (I must admit, he was really fun to create! And so cute!)

For my art journal page, I want to take things in a slightly different direction, allowing me to include the second prompt as well:

Isn't this just the cutest photo? I found it during one of my web adventures and I had to get it. I could say so many things about that precious little guy! I hope my kids will be just as cute! I won't be using this image in my journal (at least not for this page) but there are elements of it that will be borrowed for sure.

I hope you have as much fun with this week's ideas as I'm planning to, and please share what you create! I'm hoping to get caught up on posting the missing weeks (10-18) as well as photos of some of my newly created pages in the coming days. Summer vacation is only a week away and then I have complete creative freedom - and lots of time to write!