An Altered Book:: The Motor Girls on Crystal Bay

Too Much Joy :: Altered Book :: The Motor Girls on Crystal Bay

Text :

Too Much Joy

It was such a day as sometimes makes early Summer copy Spring, when the mists of morning mingle with the sun's rays, and send up shafts of haze to pillar the sky from land or water.

Ingredients:
embossing tiles, PPA mixed with Aztec Gold Pearl-Ex, metallic threads, assorted fibers, color copy, sea shells, transparency, card stock, acrylics, and a sea horse charm

Lessons Learned:
1) Remember the lessons I've already learned!! Didn't I say that the PPA dried very fast? Was it that long ago? I tried to use it to glue down the graphic of the girls and had dreadful results. That piece is about 5"x4". By the time I finished covering one half, the other half had dried. It's probably because I brushed it on thin. Next time I'll spread it on more thickly with my finger. Maybe that will help.
2) Don't be afraid to try a new glue. I had some Golden Gel Medium that I had bought but never tried. It worked great when I finally used it.
3) Do the gluing first - before the stitching or any really time intensive work. That way if I mess up the gluing, I won't have to redo something I spent a lot of time working on already.
4) Check how things are drying before they actually dry. I had glued the card stock to the book pages, closed the book and weighed it down, probably for the night. Something made me get up and look at the page. Thank goodness I did because a ripple had formed right down one of the girl's faces. Fortunately, I was able to peel the graphic off (very slowly,carefully, and fortified by several epithets) and repaste it down.

Reflections:
I started planning this page in my brain before I had even started page 3. I found the graphic of the Gibson Girls while looking for a picture of a motor boat. I printed it out and thoughts about the image and how to use it were percolating in my mind for quite a while. I thought it would be perfect for the chapter "Too Much Joy."

Don't you love that chapter title? The text that I selected for this page is the single prettiest descriptive paragraph that I have been able to find in the novel. The book is written almost entirely with dialogue; there is very little actual description. I also think it's kind of interesting that the author capitalized the words "Spring" and "Summer" in that passage. I teach 7th grade English, and I do a whole unit with them on capitalization. (Please, no email pointing out my typos and grammatical faux pas! ;-) ) One of the "rules" that I try to grind into them is not to capitalize the names of the seasons. Yet here's a book from 1913 where they did just that! Isn't it strange how language and grammar evolves?

This chapter is actually about having a picnic and all the wonderful food that the motor girls and their friends get to enjoy. But I love the idea of them spending a perfect day together on the beach, and so that's how the shells came into the picture.

I've had these shells at the bottom of a drawer for quite a long time just waiting to be used. I had to use a big chunk of pages in order to cut a hole deep enough to hold them. I tried using an embossing tile to cover them, but it was too smokey-looking and made the shells difficult to see. So I used a piece of a transparency to cover up the hole and hold the shells inside. I think it turned out pretty neat.

The use of fibers at the bottom of the page was the last thing I thought of. I had bought a sampler of fancy yarns during the summer. I had never used fibers in artwork like this before, but the shades of blue I had were so perfect, and as I laid them across the page, they made me think of rippling water. But how to attach them to the page and still keep that free flowing look?

Well, I was looking over a copy of the magazine Quilting Arts that I hadn't had time to read yet, and there was an article about a quilting/embroidery technique called "couching," where you lay the fibers on the surface of the quilt and then stitch over them to hold them in place. So that's the technique I used, only I sewed them onto the card stock before I glued it onto the book pages. The fibers are not sewn on the page real tight; in fact, you could probably pull them right out if you worked at it. But I don't expect that the book will get any kind of rough treatment that would cause them to fall out. At least I hope it won't!

The next chapter is called "Suspicion," and I have no clue what I'm going to do with that. I may skip over it and go to the chapter called "Cora's Brave Resolve." Hmmm, I already have some ideas brewing for that one. . .

Ahead to Page 5

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