Another Art Journal

I have finished another of the 21 Secrets 2013 classes. It was the Go Green; Art Journaling with Recycling by Rae Missigman. I used a vintage issue (printed in the 19th Century) of the Robinson Crusoe book Written by Himself as the title page states. As we all now know this Himself was in fact Daniel de Foe or Defoe. It wasn't in a great condition and in hindsight I would have been better using a more solid book. Having said that the rest of the process worked very well on this book. It's just that the binding is a bit weak as you can see in the detail below.

The rest of the book is hardly recognizable at all with only the inside pages still recognizable as coming from the original book. Once I start covering these pages with gesso and start to art journal on them, they too will no longer look like they belong to the original book. As you can see the cover has been altered using  many layers of gesso, acrylics, inks etc. and if you want to know all the individual stages you can still sign up for the 21 Secrets 2013 yourself. The classes will be available till the end of December this year.

For the strips of fabric around the cover I used cut-offs from the layered pieces I use to check out my stitching tension and stitches used on my machine quilted quilts. I cut the edges with a special rotary cutter that has that wave pattern you can see above, and for the closure I used sari yarn.

There is a great deal less decoration on mine than on Rae Missigman's example as I found that simply a bit too much of a good thing. It's great to complete another most enjoyable class which taught me more about adding layers, using gesso and coptic stitching.