A Bunch of Book Nuts

The first class Nathalie Kalbach taught at Bizzy B this past weekend was how to alter a book. 

Here's the book I started with, a small volume measuring about 4 inches wide by 6 inches tall, entitled "Lorna Doone", written by Richard Doddridge Blackmoor (I just looked it up on Wikipedia -  according to this writeup, it was first published in 1869 and has never been out of print since then! Who knew?).  As you can see from this photo, the front cover was quite a bit faded compared to the darker green of the back cover.

I bought this book because of the "C" on the front cover (in honour of the publisher Collins, I believe). I think I picked it up at an antique store for $1.00.  Hopefully I didn't just cut up a valuable edition of this book!

My tablemates cutting their covers

After Nathalie showed us how to cut a window in the front cover, she taught us various ways of decorating both the cover and the inside pages, using the kit she had supplied which was full of fabulous Prima products and just about everything we would need - decorative papers, glue dots, lace, flowers, double-sided tape, etc.   We also used paper punches and folding techniques to make pockets and embellishments for our pages.

Here are my fellow students, eagerly absorbing everything Nathalie was demonstrating:

It was only a 3 hour class so we didn't have time to finish our books within that time period, which is just as well, because decorating them is such a fun process, you don't want to rush it.  I spent about an hour on Sunday morning working on it, putting in several photos from the class that I had printed out on my POGO printer the night before, to make it a momento of our class.  I called it:

inside front cover

Here's a peek at what my book looks like at the moment, but I still have more pages to decorate, more fun to be had:

 

 

This photo of my tablemate Marg is from the afternoon class
but I wanted to include a picture of her in my book,
she was such a lot of fun during class.
She had travelled all the way from Newfoundland!

I really enjoyed doing this project, looking forward to making some more altered books using the techniques I learned from Nathalie!!

This pretty design is from the
inside covers of the book.