altered book

One of the assingnments of the art academy was making or altering a book. I chose a rather thick thriller to work with. I started with putting blue and green paint on some pages and smearing it all over the book. Because I wanted to fade the colours a bit I held the book under the tap. It absorbed the water enourmously and swelled.

After drying it for weeks it was totally deformed. The head and the tail looked like wings to me. I painted front and back black and wrapped rope around it.

One of the

update 'Tilleke Schwartz' embroidery

Some details of my work in progress. Because of my monthly crafty ladies club I'm making progress indeed. (Although a lot of talking is included these evenings also :-).)

spring greeting

I've made a little card for some friends with a poem (I'm sorry that it's only in Dutch.) and a print of a (home made eraser-) stamp of a crocus.
It seemed appropriate for the lovely weather we're having at the moment.

Busy

I've been busy yesterday afternoon. In a flow I moved my paintbrush on papers and sticked wooden skewers in a polystyrene ball. I don't know where it will lead to, but I had fun.

Spain journal

These are some pages from my Spain journal. The cover is fabric and I lined it with wallpaper with sketched flowers. Some of them I coloured with pencil. Back in kindergarten!
My group of friends has a 'pink' theme, so I used a lot of it in this journal.
Next post I will show some filled pages. What I did different this time is that I asked my friends to write something in this journal (about our 30 years of  friendship).

quick little project

Sometimes in my Ladies club (we're doing all kinds of crafty things) we exchange materials. This time J gave us all a small white zipper. I made (in my usual quick and dirty style) a little pouch with it and some copied collages on bookbinding cloth. I even lined it!

 

Mary Ann was in my house - no not again

 

I'm sure I posted about this event in october last year, but somehow that post has disappeared!. I'm not a regular blogger but this time it set me back even more. Because it would take lot of time doing this post again I seemed reluctant to be blogging at all (and reading other blogs).
It was great to receive Mary Ann in my house and irl she is as nice a person as you would expect from her blog. You can read her blogpost about her visit over here.

New Year resolution

I was astonished to see that my last post dated back 27th of November. I kept putting it of to write another blogpost. Partly because the things I'm making now are mostly for the Art Academy and they are not always completed projects and that interesting to show.
I also wasn't reading other blogs. Sometimes there's a bit of an overkill on visual information for me.
My resolution is to try blogging more and only in English (although it is not perfect) to make it a bit less time consuming.In the upcoming weeks I will post blogs that were in the draft file for a long time. Because I'm not wanting to quit blogging (although it crossed my mind).

But all is not that heavy and serious. There's also time to play:

Toevallige / accidental collages

Terwijl ik mijn enorme verzameling plaatjes en papiertjes aan het sorteren was, viel mijn oog soms op een toevallig bij elkaar gekomen en interessant beeld. Toegegeven, ik heb her en der een beetje geschoven om ze in fraaie rechthoeken te krijgen, maar eigenlijk hebben ze zichzelf gemaakt.

While I was sorting my enormous pile of pictures and papers, my eye sometimes fell on images that accidentally fell together and were interesting. I admit that I moved them a bit in a few places to get some nice rectangles, but they mainly made themselves.

Shrigley geprobeerd / tried

Met mijn boekbindvriendinnen probeerde ik onlangs de Shrigley binding te maken volgens de beschrijving in Handboekbinden. Dat was best leuk om te doen, totdat de band gemaakt moest worden... Toen bleek nl dat we de beschrijving niet helemaal goed hadden opgevolgd. Met als resultaat dat we papier te kort kwamen om de omslag te maken. Thuis heb ik er toen maar een draai aan gegeven door er een stuk Zaans bord aan te plakken en er een soort van sluiting aan te maken. Het geheel is nog best aardig geworden, maar als ik een serieuzer aard had gehad had ik het boekje natuurlijk helemaal opnieuw gemaakt op de juiste manier. Want de Shrigley binding is echt een heel leuke binding om losse foto's of kaarten te tonen.

With my bookbinding friends I tried to make the Shrigley binding recently according to the description in Handboekbinden. That was fun until the cover had to be made... Because then came to light that we hadn't followed the description accurately.The result was that we didn't have enough paper to make the cover. At home I gave it a swing by glueing a piece of Zaans board on it and make a kind of closure. In total it seems okay, but if I were a more serious person I would have made it all over again in the right way. Because the Shrigley is really a very nice binding to exhibit loose photos or cards.