An altered book for paperHaus

I'm so excited today to show you an altered item I made especially for the paperHaus blog!

I very first saw a book being altered by Jamie Dougherty when we were on the Prima Design Team together. It was amazing and I couldn't believe how you could do something like that. Finally, I've given it a go myself. And it's actually not toooo hard. I'm going to show you a few steps to make it super simple for you...

First choose your book and take the dust cover off.

Next mark the front cover in pencil the size of the opening you'd like to have in the front of your book. This will depend on the size of your book, so there's no set right or wrong.

Then cut the hole and all the pages inside to fit the same sized space. This may take a while depending on how far into the book you want to go.

Once you're happy with the depth of your hole, you can glue the pages together. I went through and glued a few here and there, but then used modpodge and glued around the whole of the book. I glued the outside of the book pages and the inside so everything was stuck together nicely.

Then it's time to decorate. I decided I wanted something I could hang on my wall.

In this instance as I was going to use the book as a frame for a picture of my children, I decided to use a black and white photo and some soft colours to compliment both boys and girls.

My first step was to paint the books front cover white. Then I added a series of 'dots' to the page using one of Prima's masks and some texture paste.

Once it was dry I sprayed the book with Nougat Glimmermist to 'shabby' it down and take away the starkness of the white paint.

Then I added in some muslin (cheese cloth) to the bottom and sides of the whole, plus added some painted corrugated card around the edges. This softened up the whole book.

But it still enabled the words from the pages to show through.

Finally I added in all the embellishments I thought would work to get the right 'feel' to my book/frame. I love Prima, so used all their products on this project and added in a ton of flowers (including one of their divine vines) plus as a 'centre piece' I used a set of Prima's new wooden doors to frame the photo.

I also used some Vintage Trinkets, resin pieces and a gorgeous new die from Spellbinders to create that cute little leaf you can see above.

I had such a fun time with this. A bit of paint, a bit of glue, a bit of fabric, some flowers and embellishments. This girl was in heaven!

To hang it on the wall, I just drilled a little hole in the back with a drill and now it's ready to be hung.

With Christmas coming up, this would be the perfect gift to make and give to someone special. I hope you give it a go.

Trina

PS: Did you notice the banners running across the top of the book? They are cut from the packaging of the wooden doors. Cool huh?!

Comments

[Denise S-B]

You're a clever bunny Trina, this is yet another gorgeous project

[Elizabeth]

beautiful!!

[mandyb]

oh my goodness!!
you are so so clever!!!

[Tracy]

Beautiful Trina

[Michelle Marks]

Trina I was truly inspired by your gorgoeus creation. I've done a Christmas version which you can see on my blog if you are interested. Thanks again for such wonderful inspiration!