Things Made of Book Pages & Covers

This week's challenge from Laura McHugh East was to recycle a book or book pages in an interesting way!

This piece above uses an old child's math book cover that I separated and stamped with a large foam stamp in black. I attached an embellished card a friend gave me in the center by adding watercolor, stitching around the edges and cutting with a scalloped scissor. To finish, I added a wire holder and some decorative coordinating ribbon.

Though our art can be similar in many ways, it is fascinating to see how we each come at the mixed media art genre in different way, with different techniques, materials, and results!


For this week's challenge, I felt right at home. I learned a great technique from Anna Corba several years ago about taking book covers and making decorative wall hangings from them. Anna is the author of several amazing books on mixed media art and I have learned so much from her.


For this week's challenge, I am going to show some things I made in late 2010 right after returning from a workshop I took with Anna in France, because they fit right with the theme and it is nice to go back and reminisce about fun art times of the past. Plus the photos I took of these items in my lightbox are better than what I could take today.


So here goes, and I'm going to include some instructions for a new technique I came up with for some of these.

Here's another one done on a book cover - this one a child's French book. I embellished it with some wire brads, stamped items and a picture of a French gentleman from inside the book itself.

Now, for my new technique.  

I felt bad taking apart books because I was taught as a child to revere books and I have a strong ethic around not wasting things. The book cover method is great, but you have the guts of the book left over and I wanted to do something with those piles. 

First, here are some examples of the work

These hangers are just as sturdy as the ones made with the covers, but they are made with 10-15 of the pages only.

I tore out several pages and dipped each side in melted beeswax, one edge at a time. After that cooled, I coated the front and back generously with beeswax. This stiffened up the pages and made for a nice structure upon which to collage. I attached my center elements, smaller collaged pieces I created separately, using more beeswax.

To finish, I punched two holes at the top to attach the ribbon through and added a word by doing an image transfer from a reverse printed word on plain paper on a laser jet using the same technique Laura and I used last week (adding water to rub off the paper). This technique works really well on beeswax. Just rub the image with the back of a spoon to transfer to the wax, then rub the paper off gently with some water.  

I hope you enjoyed seeing these book cover and book page creations!

There's some more info here on my blog about them.