Over the winter, I attended Lain Ehmann’s Truth Scrap scrapinar. One of my favorite classes of the day was Andrea Chebeleu’s class on creating an art journal using old hard cover books.
Using old hard cover books? As in wrecking a book? How could I?
It’s easier to do if it’s a book you don’t care about, so I headed to Goodwill to find something with a nice cover that I would be okay with destroying.
Whoever said Goodwill was cheap was lying. Next time, I’m heading for the used book bin at the library, or even the remainders table at the book store.
The book I ended up using was one by Nick Hornby, Funny Girl. Not having read it yet, I did read it, and thoroughly enjoyed it. I do like his writing!
And then I started taking it apart. In Andrea’s class, she uses an old hymnal, and all the pages are sewn together into groups called folios, and then into a supporting piece that holds all the folios together. Most modern books aren’t made that way, being put together with a great deal of glue instead. It’s possible to cut through that glue when taking apart a book since the glue is flexible, but it is a little fiddly, for lack of a better word.
As I was taking it apart, I kept debating about what I would use it for. Travel journal? Not going any place anytime soon. At least not for long enough to warrant this many pages. Art journal? I’ve already got a couple things I can use for that. I kept going back to the book title. Funny Girl. I can be funny in an ironic, punny way, but I’m not that funny. My grandmother however? Now she could tell a funny story. And she had a great laugh. I miss hearing her laugh.
Plus, the book itself was originally divided into sections with titles that I could repurpose: funny girl, comedy playhouse, the fourth series. Those are all themes that I could use to flesh out a story about my grandmother.
That’s the plan at any rate. I added a few themed double sided papers that made me think of my grandmother to further the theme along. Take a look at some of the base pages:
coloring book and phone book pages
old note paper and graph paper sketch
stenciled page and recycled mail
scrapbook paper and reclaimed book page
It’s going to be fun to work on this with my mother’s help this fall.
If anyone would like me to make a book for them, drop a comment below. I’d be glad to make one to order.