Handmade Paper Art book - cover

The cover of our books!! Each student chose a set of four sheets of handmade paper for their covers. We used two sheets of handmade paper (5.5"x8.5") for each cover/book page which allowed the backs of our brads and staples to not show in our book. After adding our art/instructions to each sheet we glued it to its coordinating sheet to create our pages. We glued a small black circle over the edge of the joined sheets, punched a couple of holes and tied on some colourful fiber - a decorative element that was added for style & function!!

In our second art session we created Zentangle designs!! These nice bold letters (A, R, T) are a font printed with only the outline and perfect for filling with zentangles. It is wonderful that the student's personal work is so prominently featured on their books!

In the next session we glued our decorated letters behind the holes of this film strip die cut (SX). The die has only two holes in it, so to create a continuous strip for our letters I folded over one section of the black cardstock strip and placed the fold very close to the cutting edge of the die before passing it through my Big Kick - voila! - a film strip with three holes!! I gave them a large silver star die cut, a small round tag for the year and some brads to add them to the front cover.

The back cover features a small silver star punchie attached with a brad. They all added their "rock star" signature next to the stars!! It took a little practice to make sure that art was not placed on the binding edge and to keep the pages upright to each other but with a little vigilance on my part we managed reasonably well to have all the art and pages properly oriented.

This quote ended up on the inside of my back cover because we required a catch up day to ensure that everyone's pages were ready for binding at the same time which eliminated one of the pages I had planned and left this quote without a page of its own. I thought it important enough to insert into their books at some place or another!!

We all need to remember that the trajectory of our lives is affected by what we think, what we say and what we do. It is always best to choose these wisely!!

Therese