An Alchemical Afternoon

Today's Alchemists at Play

A book page by Janene using "straw paper" and incorporating one of the illustrations in her book

Today's altered book workshop, Altered Alchemy, was energetic and loads of fun! We had lots of materials to work with: paints, mediums, inks, collage images, tissue paper, buttons, ribbon, yarn, rubber stamps, and lots more. Each participant had challenges to deal with in starting their altered book. Janene felt she worked too slowly, but the pages she made were exquisite! She cut a window out of several pages and looped these pages together with ribbon, rather than gluing them. It looked great.

Janene's Window

Janene looks over a basket of images.

Terri had an interesting challenge after she had done a few pages. Her pages were beautiful, but because her book was quite old, they began to come out of the book after they had been altered. We tried gluing ribbon over the join in the pages, but the ribbon was too narrow. We then came up with the notion of using "deli" paper cut to size over the joins to reinforce the pages. This did the trick. Terri decorated and painted the joins so that they looked interesting and blended well with the rest of her decoration.

Terri carefully burnishes her pages.


Nicole wrestles with the goopy medium while Peggy Joyce uses the heat gun to speed up drying.

Nicole also wrestled with the delicate photo transfer process, with good result.

Lisa unifies a page.

We had much laughter about my so-called "Theory of Unification" which is so easy and so effective. Disparate elements on a page can be brought together with a very transparent glaze, sponged or painted on and rubbed partly off with a cloth or paper towel.

Lisa's unified pages. Lisa also found she liked using cold wax medium over some of her pages, rather than acrylic medium to seal them. The wax gives a rich, light sheen.



Another view of Janene's window.

Here is a page of Terri's delightful travel wish book in progress. In the middle over the deli paper join she has stamped an italic French script~tres elegant!

Lisa had begun her book in another Art of Your Life class and today she returned to work on it some more.

She added a button on the right page by making a hole for the knob on the button and then sealing the hole.


Nicole used an old hymn book for her altered book. The right page is a unified blend of her own dyed paper and another image. The wax paper you see sticking out of the books is to keep wet pages from sticking together. Works great.

Another of Nicole's gorgeous hand dyed paper pages.

A travel page full of movement and life by Terri.

Peggy Joyce altered a book of advice for men. She's putting
her own spin on it! The right page is dyed with re-inker
and alcohol. Peggy Joyce has left some of the text showing --part of the spin?

I was inspired to do a few more pages in my own current altered book in progress.
Thanks to all of today's awesome alchemists!