Altered Book

My Sister Deb is a mixed media altered art girl. The last time I was at her house, she pulled out all her paints, glazes, rubberstamps, gel medium, scraps of paper and magazines and I made my first altered book.

Deb gave me a book she had picked up on the discount table at a book store to use as my "canvas". The Florentine background on the cover is a paper napkin, I cut out some pictures from magazines to make my Madonna and child and painted the blue robe with a glaze, scratching in the stars with the pointed wood end of the paint brush.

The Madonna image was an acrylic gel medium transfer from an ink jet print. I love the distressed look that happens with this transfer method.
One of the fun things about working on an altered book is using words or pictures that are printed on the page and incorporating them into the design.


On the left page I cut two pages with an x-acto in a decorative way and then painted each one with gold glazes and glued them onto the preceding page with gel medium. The right hand page is about 1/4" thick stack of glued pages with a window cut into it. I glued a mini book I made from the cut out pages inside the opening.
I have business cards with pictures of my quilts printed on them. These were a perfect size to cut up and glue into the mini book.



The next three spreads use fabric that I made in a workshop with Niki Bonnett when I lived in Austin. Niki has a fun workshop where you create collages on transparency film and then run fabric ironed to freezer paper through a xerox machine.

The angel was xeroxed onto organza.






A few days before we had made artist trading cards. So I glued my cards into the book.

This page has little windows cut in it like an advent calendar that reveal more pictures of my quilts.