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Welcome to my blog. Over the years that I have been stamping and paper crafting, I have so often been inspired by the ideas on other sites and blogs. I hope I can pay that back in some measure with my own. (In between laughs -- or cackles as my son calls it!)

July 21, 2015

My Altered Book (a la Seth Apter)

In mid-July, I had the absolute pleasure of taking a two day workshop from mixed media artist, Seth Apter.  My friend Trena told me about it and we signed up together months ago, and spent a fun weekend at Crystal Neubauer's studio in Gages Lake, IL.

Seth taught us a simplified form of bookmaking, using covers from a real book and a new spine to which we attached our own altered pages.  For the pages, we cut up commercial scrapbook papers in to small squares and glued them on in a grid pattern for the background.  My "grid" ended up looking more like a quilt :-) .  Then, we broke the symmetry of the grid with faux stitching, circles, and non-linear collaged shapes.  It is time consuming to glue all those little squares of paper, but it does make for a visually very rich background.

Below is my book, which took me almost two weeks after the workshop to finish.  Trena and I started with exactly the same book cover, and it was fun to see how our different styles showed in our work.  Trena's book is here.

The front and back covers, and the full book:

All the individual pages:

"Whatever you are, be a good one" and "Dream"
"Dreams come a size too big so we can grow in to them" and "Sing"
"Laugh and the world laughs with you.  Cry and you cry with your girlfriends."
"Dreams are whispers from the soul."
"Find your passion"
"Love & scandal are the best sweeteners of tea."
"If at first you do succeed, try not to look astonished."
"There is nothing better than a good friend, except a friend with chocolate."
Beauty (Vanity Fair)





"Once in a while...right in the middle of an ordinary life, Love gives us a fairy tale."
"Life may not be the party we hoped for, but while we're here we might as well dance."

Breathe and Fly
"Occasionally her afternoon tea ran right in to cocktail hour and there was just nothing she could do about it"

I had a great time with Trena at the workshop.  Seth is a great artist and instructor!