Card Making and Altered Books

I have been busy preparing for a class I'm co-teaching to a local crafting group next week. The class is on making Valentines Day cards, as well as other occasion cards as well. I've been busy creating & assembling sample cards. It's lots of fun to be able to make fussy, lacy cards. The regular crafting leader is off to Arizona for a couple of months, so I volunteered to 'teach' the classes while she is gone. It's harder than I thought it would be to come up with a project that can be completed in one session and that will be interesting to several people with varied interests, plus not involve buying expensive supplies.

Next month we'll be altering a children's board book. I think that they should be able to finish covering the pages with various methods at least and probably have time to embellish a few pages as well. I'm hoping to do the books on a life journey theme, with a little journaling thrown in. As usual, I searched Ebay first and was pleased to find that I could buy good quality new board books cheaper than buying used at Goodwill. I'm get a bit silly about altering certain books and sure enough, some of them sounded just too nice to alter. I do that all the time. I go to Goodwill to the vintage book section. I buy three or four old books intending to alter them. I bring them home and really start looking at them and decide they are too interesting, too lovely or too unusual to alter. LOL More books on the book shelf, thus more book shelves. Making that first alteration to a book is the hardest part.

I participated in an altered book round robin swap group for about a year. The group fell apart as a few people dropped out without bothering to send on other people's books. That seemed just terrible to me. Not only did the owner of the book never get it back, but they never got to see anything from the people that had contributed their artistic talent to the book. I know that I worked very hard to make the pages I altered special in some unique way in each book I worked on. For a while it looked like one of my books was 'lost' but it finally showed up and completed the circuit (reduced by a drop out here and there). If you sign up to participate in something like that, I feel that you are obliged to follow through. If the cost of mailing a book a month is going to be too much for you, don't sign up. Enough of a soap box lecture. It was a lot of fun to work on the various books with their different themes and try and come up with creative artistic ideas for each book. One thing about me I'm never short of supplies. I would like to join another similar group, but this first experience was not a completely positive one.