Summer ~ Page 11 :: Altered Book :: As the Earth Turns

Text:

Summer

Ingredients:

a priority mail Tyvec envelope, assortment of sulky threads, F&W Acrylic Inks, Lineco document repair tape

Lessons Learned:

I don't really have any on this page. How disappointing.

Process:

Remember the piece of yellow tyvec I was going to use a couple of pages ago? So Well, I ended up using it in a completely different way on this spread. Prevously, I had cut a piece of tyvec that would cover a double page spread, from a USPS priority mail envelope. I crinkled it up really good and then opened it up again and smoothed it down. I used different colors of yellow ink and painted the tyvec and let it dry.

The first thing I did for "Summer" was to remove the two book pages that I wanted to decorate from the book using an exacto blade and cutting very close to the gutter. I then used the document repair tape to reconnect the pages in the middle. I had to remove the pages so I could sew onto them with my sewing machine. I cut a window in the tyvec where I wanted the chapter title to show through, only I measured wrong and the window was off-center. Drats! I fixed this by using some extra scraps of the painted tyvec and gluing then over the opening to fix the size. You can't really see this faux pas unless you look really closely. But hey, that's what I meant to do.

I then glued the tyvec onto the pages, weighted it down, and let it dry. I used my heat tool to speed up the drying. I'm terribly impatient about things like that. The rest of the page was just a matter of sewing. I used a double needle and yellow thread in the bobbin. I kept alternating the colors of the threads, and I made sure to leave threads hanging when I cut them at the end of a "seam."

When all the stitching was done, I trimmed the threads so that there would be a colorful fringe around the edges of the book, and then I used gel medium to glue the whole thing back into the book. As I'm looking at the pages now, I'm noticing that the tyvec page has not adhered that well to the book page, so I'm going to have to shove a little gel medium in there an weight the book down again.

Reflections:

I purchased a new printer as a belated birthday present to myself. Its the Epson Stylus C82. It uses the DuraBrite pigment inks and has four separate ink cartridges. I was tired of running down to made color copies, so that I could use them in my art. These inks are waterproof and fade resistant. So far, I'm really happy with how it's printing, although it is a bit on the noisy side when the paper first feeds into the machine.

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