Craft Stamper - May magazine

 In the May issue of Craft stamper, there were some great projects - and I have been working on one of them on and off for a while now.

It was to make a book out of recycled materials - by Katy - very inspiring, and the great thing is that you can keep adding pages, to build up a nice journal.

The covers were made out of a cut up cardboard box.

Here is my effort.

This is part of a sheet of pre-printed paper.  What you can't see is that it has lots of texture where I have painted over it, stamped, and embossed - and have used a gold spray in parts too.  I tore up scraps of paper and stamped and painted those, and made them into a distressed flower and added a button.

I did the same with the back cover - you can see on this a bit better the colouring and metallic paints.

The butterfly I stamped onto painted paper, and the body and the spots are made from layers of stickles and sparkle in the light

The cardboard is rather thick, so I have punched holes for book rings.

I have also made a start on the internal pages.

This is the inside cover - I have painted it with metallic paint and experimented with stamping with paint.  I was quite pleased with the paper 'bag' I made with the little blue egg 'in' it.

This is really fun to make and a great opportunity to try out all different techniques.

You need to tear sheets of newspaper to just under the size of the book covers.  It takes ten sheets of paper for each page - then glue them together.  They are meant to look 'ragged'.

I used different layers of paint combinations.  I did the gluing and sticking over a few days as they needed to be left to dry - ditto the painting of each one of them.

This is the book made up - I had to balance it on a box so that you could get an idea of the fringing.

The pages look askew as I have had to  open them to balance the book.

I decided to make this book to celebrate the magical moment a little while ago, when I sat in the shade in my garden and heard all sorts of bird song.

These pages are to celebrate the thrushes that visit our garden.

I painted the pages before I decided on a theme - so they are not very colour co-ordinated - but great practice experimenting.  I have tried to make the paper look vintage and aged, and the thrush in the nest I have copied from a book, and sketched over it and shaded it.  I bet you can guess the book I have used.   If you can't today  -  you will absolutely know when you see the other pages I have made.