Last Saturday I was playing around with coriander seeds Boris had brought home from his food shopping trip. There were a few scattered on the kitchen table and I started to wonder what they’d look like in the tiny bottles I’ve had waiting in the wings for their own altered book to call home. I loved how they looked in the bottle so I went searching through more things for different items to try. The photo above shows what I came up with: coriander seeds, feathers (thanks Jess), dried rosemary, and salt. As I’ve mentioned before, playing with materials is the best way I’ve found to come up with ideas for my altered book art. It moves me from abstract thinking about objects and the vague ideas I have, to playing with them and clarifying what works and what does not. Now I know I do want the bottles to contain things, and it makes me realize they’ll need to be sealed. I have an idea about that too which I need to explore.

The paper flowers in these two photos are from the altered book I just finished this week. The flowers were created using a flower-shaped paper punch on the book pages. It was an experiment because I wanted to see what the book would look like with pieces of the pages removed, but it wasn’t a very effective technique this attempt. It did leave me with piles of flowers and I decided to string these together and make them part of the composition in the book.

More on the finished book later this week. I haven’t yet had a chance to photograph it.