craftgrrl | Honeymoon: An Altered Book (Reply)

This is my first completed altered book. I had been planning on creating an altered book to house all of the paper bits I collected on our honeymoon and bought several books at garage sales to use. They all ended up being too flimsy when I tried to paint them, or were just the wrong size for me. I found a "Baby Einsteins" board book at Borders for 50 cents and snatched it up. I then sanded off the shiny surface with a sand paper block (in the future I will forgo sanding as it's messy and just peel the top layers of paper off the book, as a friend recommended). After I made everything non shiny I put on a big gloppy layer of white gesso, leaving any chunks it made on the page to add texture, painted the whole thing several times with a watered down brown paint, and then added maps and scrapbooking backing papers. I worked the cover first, because I had fantastic backing paper courtesy of a friend of mine and had a clear idea for the layout.

The pages were another story. They took forever as I would lay things down, move them around, frown at them, rearrange everything, and then repeat until I either became frustrated or things clicked. I collected all of the paper bits while we were on our honeymoon and added very minimal embellishments in the way of photos and a few paper scraps and stamps. The big chunky leaf stamps I carved from an old eraser. The shiny leaves scattered throughout were confetti that was at our wedding. I hoarded as much of that as I could find as well... I may have a problem. :D

Anyway, Here it is!

If anyone wants to know where any of the bits and bobs on the pages are from, or what any of the pages mean, or have any questions at all really, feel free to ask. There are also descriptives and in progress shots on my Flickr. I'm planning on snatching up children's books wherever I find them now.