Dream, Grow, Fly: Altered Book Shrine

I've been dabbling in the altered books class that Monica Zuniga is teaching. This lesson was on how to make altered book shrines. The shrine in this example doesn't have anything to do with religion or sacred objects. It's more like a fancy group of niches.

Anyway, it's very time consuming! The hardest part is carving up the book. That took me a couple of days. This wasn't a thick book. It's a very old arithmetic book that I found in the library discard bin. The pages were brown and brittle. The great part about making these is you glue all of the pages together in two blocks. After the glue dries, then you mark out where you want to cut it. That's when it gets messy and tedious.

I have tons of little beads, charms and miscellaneous ephemera sitting in plastic bins just waiting for a project like this. I even found a use here for an old Zetti rubber stamp image that I made into a shrinky-dink a long time ago for another project (the little girl on the right hand page at bottom left). It didn't turn out like I wanted and I almost pitched it but I thought maybe someday I'd find a use for it. Ha! You never know. Now I know I'll never throw anything away! It could get even more cluttered in here. :( I love the altered book ideas Monica's giving us. I've got two more in the works. I won't tell anymore than that. But I'm having a blast working on them.

Other news: I'm featured on the CitraSolv brochure advertising for their CitraArt! My Warhol collage (the favorite thing I've done so far) is on the brochure! I'm in the company of some very talented artists whose work just blows me away. They are: Robert Burridge (I love all of his art), Mary Thomas, Cathy Taylor and Lyric Kincaid. Awesome!! Here is the brochure. You can click on it and get a better look:


Needless to say, it made my day when I received a bunch of these in the mail. Thanks to Melissa Zeitler of CitraSolv for all of her support and hard work! Check out their artist site (and my page)! There are so many great ideas on there for experimenting with the CitraSolv. I just need time to try them all. :)

That's it for today. Allergy season has really taken a toll on me these last couple of weeks. Hopefully I'll be able to get back to normal very soon and start more experimenting.