In the spirit of all the book arts we’ve been looking at this month, I thought I’d experiment with a new way to join pages together.  New to me, anyway!  Tomorrow for Technique Tuesday, I’ll share the method that I used to make this little booklet

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Crocheted Book

Pug Book

I’d like to declare this entire month a time to celebrate book arts in all its many forms: handmade books, altered books, fabric books, journals, scrapbooks, and all other types of books that we can come up with!  Spring is just around the bend now (except here in New England and probably in Alaska too!), and it’s time to gather in some inspiration for the coming months.

I’ll be sharing the work of quite a few book artists with you, but I don’t want to leave out your work!  The more the merrier!  If you would like to have your work featured here, just send me your artist statement of one to two paragraphs, and up to three images (72dpi res) of your work, along with a link to your site and your name as you would like it to appear.  Mail it to cyndi @ b5Media.com (remove the spaces) and please put “Book Artist” in the subject line.

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Book arts month!

Monoprints are a world of fun to make.  You simply never really know what you’re going to come up with.  You can use them as  backgrounds, tear them up as collage elements, or sometimes even keep them “as is.”

Tomorrow, I’ll outline the simple steps, but in the meantime, gather together your paints, watercolor or stock paper, and prepare a flat surface with freezer, contact, or waxed paper!

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Monoprints

Here’s a piece I made when I was a Brownie Scout. I can’t remember if that was first grade or kindergarten, but whichever, I think I’ve developed a bit more skill since then. Don’t worry about how feeble your first attempts are…just keep going. It does get better!

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Don’t worry! You will get better at this stuff :-)

Well, some things just take time

Back in October of last year, I showed you how to make lovely rusted fabric for use in your projects, and promised that I’d come up with one myself…eventually!  So better late than never, I guess.  Tomorrow, I’ll show you the steps to make a little rusted fabric art quilt similar to this one.

My Soul Finds Rest

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My Soul Finds Rest

My Heart

There may not be time for really elaborate projects before Valentine’s Day, but surely you could do one or two of these!

Slightly stuffed fabric hearts – I originally made these for Christmas, but think of the Valentine’s possibilities!

Valentine’s Day jewelry

Green Valentine’s Day cards

Free Patterns for Valentine’s Day crafts

Romantic crafts from junk

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Preparing for Valentine’s Day!

Completed house book

Based upon the article, House Books, by Leilani Pierson, in the Nov/Dec 2008 issue of Cloth Paper Scissors.  I decided to use some of the papers that I collected on our trip to Italy, and collage them over maps of the region.  The green fiber ties were from an Italian gift from our daughter.

Materials

Reverse side of each page

Front side of each page

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House book

I’ve made an important discovery: I can’t work when I’m surrounded by a mess.  I used to think that I could, right up until the time that all my creative joy and energy just evaporated.  I didn’t even care when each Make Art Monday rolled around, and that used to be my favorite day of the week.  What happened was that I hadn’t bothered to clean up after any project that I did…just let it all accumulate. 

Some folks love that.  They love the serendipity of having stuff strewn all over so that they’ll see connections they otherwise would miss.  But not me.  I like a clean table.

I had worked very hard at making sure that my desk, where I do my writing, was always clean, because I recognized that I was incapable of settling down to write in the middle of a mess.  But I always assumed that my art table was a different matter. 

See, you can still learn new stuff about yourself, even when you’re on the downside of your 40s!  I made another really important discovery in this process: my work table is WHITE!!!

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My worktable: before and after

You can whip up a batch of these in no time flat!  They’d be great for your tree, your doorknobs, for gifts, to dress up a wrapped package.  There’s no pattern necessary, no excessive planning…just pull out your fabrics and embellishments today, and tomorrow I’ll show you how easy these are to put together

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Fabric hearts

 There are times when you want a perfect image transfer.  I know that seems almost like heresy coming from me, the queen of the imperfect (and proud of it!) transfer.  Most of the methods that I teach here result in somewhat, shall we say, unpredictable images.  And that’s the beauty of the whole image transfer process.  If you wanted it perfect, you’d just cut it out and stick it down!

However, even I have to admit that there may be times when cutting it out and sticking it down will not give you the look you’re after.  You really do want an image transfer, you just want it to be a really really good one!

Here’s one answer: The Transfer Kit, by Tilano.  I played with a kit recently that Randy Orr, the founder, sent to me to try out.  If you follow the directions, the results are pretty much fool proof.  Whew!

The kit contains special transfer paper and acrylic medium that work together to transfer your image perfectly every time.  One thing to note is that you must use either toner copies or laser prints.  Inkjets will not work with this transfer paper.  Although color copies (again, toner or laser) work, I only had access to a black and white when I did my first test, and it came out great as well.  Below, you can see my results, where I applied the transfer to painted and collaged canvas: 

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Tilano’s Transfer Kit