My Art - collaged tag

One evening we decided to play a little and created this cool little tag which was inspired by a blog post - one of the many that Linda follows with her Google Reader.
We used plastic packaging for the large clear tag and ran it through the Cuttlebug in the Textile embossing folder. Created a coordinating green cardstock tag and collaged the front!! Added some fibers and voila!! - a cool little tag we can add to our altered books somewhere along the line!!

I would highly recommend getting together with your creative friends and making "stuff"!! It is so fun to have people who understand you and that you can brainstorm with.
We visited some garage sales, attended the Women's Art Festival with a few of her friends and went to a stage production on Sunday afternoon. Great R&R for me!!

I am grateful for Linda's hospitality and willingness to share her life with me. She has a suppotive husband who was gracious and understanding. I am blessed!!

Therese

My Art - first coptic bound book

Linda and I both wanted to learn some bookbinding techniques and decided to start with making a coptic bound book. We perused our personal libraries for instructions and searched the internet for more information as well. We had several books between us that had some instructions, printed some instructions from the internet and found several video tutorials that were helpful. Here is where you will find the video tutorial we found most helpful when we made our books!! It took amazingly little time for us to make our books!! Less than an afternoon to make our covers, signatures and to bind our books!!! They are quite loose because we did not tie off our original thread because we were following printed instructions when we first began. I will be redoing mine to make it tighter!! We used book board which we covered with paper. I used hand decorated paper on mine which was created with the leftover acrylic paint from the creation of the pages for the mini book in my previous post applied to a brown paper envelope from our shopping trip to the local art store. I used 28 lb colour laser paper in my signatures - 4 sheets per signature - 3 signatures. I may consider adding signatures when I redo my binding. I used waxed crochet thread for binding as I did not have any waxed linen. We used a cropadile to make the holes in our covers and an awl to make the necessary holes in our signatures. This technique does create an exposed spine which makes it easy to add danglies, fibers and charms!! With this binding every page in the book opens flat and is fully accessible which makes it a great choice for an art journal or altered book.
If you have been interested in bookbinding I would encourage you to give it a try. Very fun!! Customize a book with your favorite papers for both the covers and the signatures best suited to just what you want!!

Therese