Dorothy Where are You? Shadow Box Altered Book

On AFTCM I am participating in a shadow box book swap. That is, we take an old hard cover book and make a niche in it, then create a scene, etc with the theme of "Dorothy where are you"?

I found a youtube video tutorial and used it to make the niche and glue the pages together, and did each step on separate nights.  I painted the book and the sides with black acrylic paint and added some copper paint in various spot.

I went to my local stamp store and was fortunate to get some Graphics 45 paper on sale with the Wizard of Oz theme. I selected several images and cut them out.

I tore some of book pages that came out of the niche and glued them to the cover then did a black color wash over them. I took a frame that I found at the dollar store and coloured it with alcohol inks. Set this aside while I printed off an image of a castle from Dover publications, in two different sizes.

I took a die cut shoe, some German Scraps trim, a label holder die cut, and some metal flower pieces and covered them with clear embossing ink, then added "stamp and stick" embossing powder then covered them with Glitter Ritz glitter.I added a coloured pearl to the centre of the flowers .

I taped a green piece of cardstock to the centre of the cover and framed it with the altered German Scraps.  I took the the two images that I had printed off and coloured them with artist chalks and set them with some fixative. I cut it down the smaller one to fit inside the frame and attached it to the book cover. I added the label holder with "where's Dorothy" underneath.

To make the shoe look a bit more like Dorothy's I added a wee bow and a clear gem and adhered it to the bottom corner. The flowers went on the top left corner. To finish the cover I added a book corner on the other corners.

I then proceeded to work on the inside of the book. On the left-hand side I used the checkered paper as a base, adding some variegated purple paper and some red glittered tape. Glued the scarecrow image, Toto the good and bad witches on. I stamped a Tim Holtz ticket and saying on the purple paper and attached it to the bottom.

I used the larger image from Dover Publications in the niche; my version of the Emerald City since I could not find any copyright free images of it. I used the same glittered red piece at the top of the page and added gems and the Journey embellishment. I put the Tin Man, Cowardly Lion and Scarecrow in place with two layers of double-sided foam tape on the back to give them dimension. 

I took some trim and added it around the niche so the inside edges of the niche are not visible and glued some ribbon around the edges. To hide the joins in the trim, I attached four book corners.

I did not use Dorothy anywhere in the book except the back cover. In AFTCM we have the artistic license to create and interpret the theme in our own way and challenge ourselves, therefore,  I chose to have her missing rather than in a specific place in the Land of OZ.

To be honest, I really waited until I had finished the book before signing up for the swap as I was not sure I could accomplish something that I would feel good about sending to someone. Now it is completed I am happy with it and I enjoyed the journey and the challenge.

Doodles Unleashed Alphabets

On the ArtVentures group I am participating in a Doodles Unleashed Alphabet swap, based on Traci Bautista's style of doodling.

I am not sure I am doing these right as I think I need to be more "free' in creating the letters, but I went ahead with the first four and hope that the other participants won't be disappointed with my efforts.

The A is on a colour wash background and coloured with Tombow markers, B is a Fresco ink background and the letter coloured with Twinkling H2O's, C is a shaving cream marbled background on matte cardstock - the letter coloured with Tombow markers and Galaxy Gel Pens, D is on an acrylic paint background.

A Garden Journey Book

On AFTCM I am participating in a swap where we are making a house shaped book themed " A Garden Journey". A friend on the group was kind enough to send me a template of various shapes for the house and I cut them out on some cardboard.

For the front I printed off a gate on a piece of acetate and cut it to size.

The first page is an picture of a door from my friend Adrienne from her personal collection which she shared on one of our groups. I cut out images from an old calendar which had various garden themes and worked them around the door image. For the peak of the house I chose a butterfly from a brochure - one of my favourite things.


The back of this page was covered with some scrapbook paper and again I used some flowers from the old calendar as well as a magazine page.  The image of the lady is from magicmoonlightfreeimages.blogspot.com. I added a border from an old greeting card at the bottom and the word sticker on the top.

Page 3. I coloured a piece of cardstock with Cathie Allan's Stamp Smoosh technique, and lightly stamped a music stamp all over, cut it out and attached it to the cardboard shape. I stamped and coloured the LaBlanche stamp of the little girl in the daisies, cut it out and added it to the stamped background. To complete the page I added a transparency which I recently bought and a little sunflower button to which I added a punched image and a dewdrop which I coloured with alcohol ink.

The back of this page was covered with scrapbook paper which really is not floral but I thought it would work well with some little dimensional plastic flowers that I had in my stash. I added gems to a couple of the flowers that had holes in the centre.

Page 5, I started by stamping an old favourite PSX stamp of a garden pond scene and coloured it with Lyra coloured pencils. I then added colour to the background with chalks then added stamped trees, rocks and grass. I printed off the bird image which is a freebie from Elizabeth's blog. I then stamped the "welcome" stamp coloured and cut it out and added it at the bottom.

The back of the previous page started off with what my friend Trish B calls "worksheet wonders"; basically a piece of paper that has been under a project while stamping or spraying. In my case this was a piece of cardstock that was under a project that I was spraying with Adirondack color wash. There were a lot of white spaces so I added Ranger distress stain over the whole sheet, which is transparent enough to allow some of the original colours to show through.

I stamped a Judikins Sunflower stamp on the background using distress ink and distress embossing powder.

I printed off a poem and put it under a cute little frame that I bought for a couple of dollars at Michaels. The bird image is a thin sheet of self-adhesive cork precisely laser-cut from Magenta which I coloured with pigment inks. Finally I added a butterfly, a little rainbow and a grass sticker.

Page seven, I covered with a floral themed paper. I had some chipboard pieces left from my Ezee Pzee design kits and decided that the tree would be my centre piece. I coloured it with acrylic paints. I found some apple and squirrel stickers in my stash and added them to the tree. I also had a smaller Magenta cork bird that I had already coloured and added it on one of the branches. The little pink cat was from a stash of embellishments and I thought he/she would be perfect sitting under the tree, perhaps hoping the squirrels would come down?

At the top I added the acrylic daisy and the Escape stickers  to finish off the peak.

The opposite side of page 7 started off with a piece of a brochure with a floral design at the edge. I printed a poem/quote and coloured over it to make it blend into the background, but the edges still showed so I added some sticker borders around it.

The bird image is from Elizabeth's blog and the 3-D bunnies were a gift from my friend Tracy. To complete the peak I cut out a large flower from the old calendar to make it look like a roof. The little bees are from a free sheet of images from vintagepaintworks.com. I am not sure if these are available anymore as I could not find the site when I recently did a search to link to them.

For the back cover I cut a piece of thick vinyl and stamped a saying at the bottom in Stazon ink. I had some wooden bird pieces from Kaisercraft which I painted with acrylic paint and glued to the cover.

This will be on the way to my partner later this week. Hope she likes it as much as I enjoyed making it.

4X4 inchie Quilt

On AFTCM we are doing another 4X4 swap, this time being an inchie quilt block. I tried several different stamps for this but was not happy with any of them.

For the base I took a piece of black cardstock that I had underneath another project while spraying Smooch Spritz and Glimmer Mists, and added some other colours of Smooch Spritz to it. I ran it through the Swiss Dots Cuttlebug folder.

I found some scrapbook paper that Tolegranny sent me which looked like the Tim Holtz alcohol ink Splatter technique. Since it was a thin paper I glued it to a piece of cardstock then punched out the squares with a 1" punch. After attaching them to the background I felt that it still needed something, so I had some stars that came off of a die cut border sitting in a dish. I added one to the centre then sporadically around the squares.

Hope my partner likes my creation.

A-Z techniques Alphabet M

Finished my M for the ArtVentures A-Z techniques. For this month I decided on doing a metallic ink background. I tried doing it with the marbling technique but for some reason the inks kept sinking to the bottom of the pan of water, no matter how full or empty it was. So I reverted to dipping the glossy cardstock in the water and adding inks  while it was wet

To complete the M theme, I used a music stamp on the background and stamped a young boy for masculine and finally added a piece of Mica Tile over the image.