patchwork book

If you don’t already know, you know now, I am an absolute horder, I even keep my used kitchen towels.

What on earth can you do with those I hear you say? Well, for one you can use them in your collages, they have nice color and texture.

Or you can turn them into little canvases.

Here is a step by step (credit for Jennibellie, find her tutorial here)

You take a paper towel, apply a generous amount of glue all over the surface, fold it and smear all the airbubbles out with your fingers (o yeah, did I mention that this might get a little messy)

Repeat, so add some more glue and fold.

Now you have your little square canvas, let it dry (this can take a couple of days) and you'll have a sturdy little canvas.

Once dry I place some heavy books on them to flatten them.

My idea was to stitch 4 squares to form a patchwork page, once I have made all the pages I will bind them together with the Bind-it all.

But as you can see my stitching is rubbish, so I thought maybe I can staple them together

But didn't really like the look, so I just glued them to a page, this way however I do loose the back of them.

In each square I will be writing funny stuff my son tells or does.

Some examples
What are we eating tonight? veal. you mean the veal has laid some meat. euh, no, we are eating the veal. That's not nice, the veal should grow up first and become very old.
or we were playing a guessing game and I gave the description of a car: we have 2 of them and they have 4 wheels, he answers the garbage bins :-)

toilet roll mini book

If you have visited this spot before you probably already know that I like to use everyday materials. Well, what do we all have in abundance and just throw away, toilet rolls.

There are numerous tutorials on what to do with them and one that caught my eye was transforming them in a mini book.

This was such a cool idea I just had to give it a go.

First I flattened the rolls out and gessod the front, back and inside (only the first cm or so). I used homemade gesso (last time I used plaster but this gave a rough structure, so now I tried it with baby powder, much better and mmm the smell)

Next I applied a layer of ochre acrylic paint which I left to dry,

I toned it down with walnut DI and also distressed the edges.

Cut out rectangle pieces of pattern paper,

distressed the edges with the same walnut DI and glued them down.

Next I needed to make ‘spines’ for each page, I cut out small rectangles, used a decorative scissor for the edge and stamped a small flower on it.

I punched 2 holes in each roll/page and used 2 book rings to hold everything together.

The neat part about this book is that each page can hold a tag, so I made some tags out of the same patterned paper.