I bought the four little old men made of clay on an impulse back in the fall. I was killing time in one of those everything-and-the-kitchen-sink Asian shops one rainy day, and decided to look for tea cups to use in an altered book. I found the tea cups and decided little clay men would be a good purchase as well. Last week when I began brainstorming ideas for a new altered book I brought them out and decided I needed to make them a cherry tree to sit under.

The little men are slightly set into the book, which is the least noticeable part, but took me a few hours to cut the four niches into the pages. The blossom flowers were made by using a paper punch and then stringing them together with a needle and thread. I used origami paper for both the flowers and the lovely blue background. The tree trunk is a rolled up page within the book with ink rubber stamped to create bark texture.

Materials used: book, origami paper, clay figures, rubber stamp and ink, and lots of glue.

Those tiny bottles I started working with a few weeks ago have all been filled with things and have at last made their way into an altered book. I raided the spice rack for the bulk of the filler, selecting herbs and spices based on colour and texture. One of the bottles is filled with tiny seeds from Yuuki‘s food. I decided to fill the brown bottles with random inedible items and have something sticking out the top of each because they are too opaque to see inside.

When I first envisioned the bottles in a book I thought I would put them in orderly rows as if they were on shelves, but as I started to create the composition it seemed more interesting to stack them and have the rows overlap. I had to decide exactly how they would be arranged before I could start cutting into the book, and I had to maintain the same arrangement in order to make them fit back in.

The bottles inspired thoughts about alchemy, potion mixing and magic so I used this as the jumping off point as I chose the finishing touches for the composition. The book is lined with sewing pattern paper with lines and symbols that make me think of star charts, and the colour of the paper seems old and yellowed. Every other object I chose is metallic – various coins, a locking mechanism and a key – to tie into the transmutation of metals often associated with the art of alchemy. The copper coil in the center of the book was made by winding wire around a skewer. I added the same copper wire to the seven brown bottles because they looked too plain as they were.

Materials used: book, sewing pattern paper, locking mechanism, coins, rusty key, glass bottles, copper wire, dried flowers, metal chain, pencil crayon, bamboo stick, map fragment, book page fragment, feathers, bird seed, and various herbs and spices.

As mentioned in a previous blog post, rummaging through my art supplies inspired me to create an altered book with fish. It may just be that I have fish on the brain lately, but rummaging through my supplies reminded me of the gold paper fish I’d bought from Urban Source over the summer. It was high time to use them. I added the red colour to each fish using ink because I didn’t like the plain gold, and now they unintentionally resemble salmon.

I wanted to create a sense of water moving, of waves crashing with the pages, so I began to play around with folding the pages under one another. At first I was only going to do part of the book, but then the more I did, the more it made sense to fold every single page. The Japanese paper I used on the end pages reminds me of the pattern created when raindrops splash into the still water of a pond or lake. The finishing touch of the book was to add the red and white flowers, which were created using a paper punch.

Materials used: Japanese paper, book, flowers made with a paper punch, rubber stamps, ink, and metallic paper fish.

It’s really frustrating when I spend a lot of time working on something and when I’m done I don’t feel happy with it. That’s how I felt about this altered book Wednesday afternoon after spending most of the day on it. I felt the composition was too busy and I’d managed to completely de-emphasize the book part of this altered book because pages and bookish elements are mostly hidden. I stepped away for awhile and was able to look at it with fresh eyes later. Now I like it. It’s very different from the other altered books I’ve created so far.

I’d been trying to come up with ideas to make further use of the bag of wooden animals I picked up at a garage sale. I used a tiger and rabbit in a previous work, and chose the bear this time with the thought that it’s posture resembled that of a performing bear. I went looking for a rubber ball for the bear to balance upon and then remembered I had a set of circus-themed paper dolls from the specialty doll review site I order from, in my stash of ephemera.  And with that, a circus book was born!

Materials used in this book: book, tissue paper, recycle paper bag, wooden bear, rubber ball, stars, circus-themed paper dolls, thread and needles.

This is my seventh altered book, which kind of amazes me because I only started making these in mid-September. I’ve been wanting to make more before deciding what to do next in regards to showing and selling them. I want to have a group of them all together and get an overview of where I’m going with this before I can let any of them go or make decisions about a show. I’ve set the goal to have ten altered books completed by the end of the year. I began working on number eight today so it could happen.

I started this butterfly book on the same day as the previous altered book with folded pages. I decided to retain the 3D accordion affect by leaving the folded pages loose and gluing one corner of each to the proceeding page to retain the shape and structure. This altered book was definitely one of the trickier ones to create. The wire I used in the centre of the book bent out of shape easily and the middle butterflies were not very cooperative about gluing onto them. The pages were also quite brittle and would tear easily. All factors that make this the most delicate and fragile altered book art I’ve made so far.

Materials used in this altered book: book, Japanese paper, resistor wire, acetate (?) butterflies, gel medium and glue dots.

I experimented with a new technique with this book. Folding the pages is yet another way to manipulate an old book, and there are so many different ways to fold the paper too. I loved how it looked when it was done because the folded pages create a beautiful pattern within the book. I decided to divide the pages into two sections and glue the edges of the paper together on either side, leaving the end pages exposed because I liked the pattern. I kept things simple with the composition of this book because the type on the page and the pattern on the end pages makes things busy enough. I wrapped the thread around the flower seed pod stem because I felt it needed just one more little thing.

My friend Siobhan was looking at the altered books in person yesterday and told me she didn’t get a good sense of them in three dimensions because so far I’ve photographed all of them flat. I decided to take more detail shots of this one to give people a better idea of what the whole thing looks like.

A sewing needle embedded into the pages to secure the thread.

A dedication written “To Elsie” on the end papers.

Materials used in this altered book: book, thread, two sewing needles, a poppy seed pod, and gel medium.