Recycled Mini-Album–Finished at Last!

Saturday was the first anniversary of my father’s death. It seems appropriate that I completed the album that celebrates his life on that very day.

I have two photos to end the book. The first is of my dad with his newborn granddaughter, who will be the recipient of this book. The other is the very last photo that was ever taken of him, on his 90th birthday at the residential home. They put a candle on his pudding, and you can see how happy he looks. I am so glad that despite his confusion with the dementia at the end of his life, he spent his last days content and at peace, in a beautiful care home, with his family visiting when we could.

Here is the page spread with the background and borders. To create the background I stamped with a Stamp Barn swirl stamp (FLR 0211), using Versamark, and then brushing on randomly three different Perfect Pearls, in Turquoise, Forever Green and Forever Violet. You can see the semi-circular hole for the tag on the left.

The page complete. You can see the tag in place on the left, with its tag puller with the embossed flower. The reverse of this tag is the clocks tag on the previous page.

The last few pages of the book are taken up with details of its construction and embellishment, and some blank pages for my niece to add her own reminiscences and photos.

After completing the second page, I realised I’d left out several of the materials, for instance alcohol inks and inked kitchen paper. Ah well. No room for any more!

For the final “Notes” pages I cut sheets of plain white paper to shape, and distressed the edges with Black Soot distress ink, and stuck them down onto each page using soft matt gel medium. I was careful to apply this only to the back of the sheets and the surface of the actual page, and around the edges of the top surface of the sheets only, and not over the whole top surface, so that there would be a plain paper surface for my niece to write on with any pen or pencil of her choice.

The next step was to work on the borders, and I created a different one for each of the three pages, using white acrylic paint, and tidying up the edges with a waterproof black pen once the paint was dry.

The final step was to add the little cartoon that one of my dad’s medical student friends drew of him – I also used this picture in his funeral service sheet. My sister has the original.

I stuck the picture down onto the end paper at the back of the book and added some embellishment with a sepia archival pen, along with my blog address at the bottom of the page.

The end of the book! A good brush up to get rid of any traces of gel medium that had got embedded in the binding, and a final coat of acrylic wax, well buffed up, to give a nice vintage leather effect. I am particularly pleased that despite getting a bit carried away with lots of texture which added a huge amount of thickness to many of the pages, when closed, the book covers are exactly parallel – just as they should be!

Just a reminder of what the front looks like.

This has been an amazing project to work on. Every page was full of special memories of me, and I am sure that getting them all down on paper has helped my grieving process in the year following my wonderful dad’s death. Also, I have been thinking constantly about my niece who is to receive the book, and hoping that it will be a real treasure for her to keep for her lifetime, a little memorial of her grandfather. This has truly been a labour of love. Finally, it has been an adventure and exploration into the world of mixed media, and throughout, I have been learning new techniques, and stretching my skills and thinking outside the box, using all kinds of different materials. This adventure has been so much fun!

The final step will be to make a video slideshow of all the photos I took on Saturday night, of each completed page, with perhaps the addition of some work-in-progress pages. I want to keep as comprehensive a record as possible for my own benefit, as I shall feel another bereavement once this book goes to my niece – it has been such an important part of my life for the last eight months!

Before starting this book, I was working on a larger album about Dad, for my hubby and me to keep, based on the “Tattered Time” paper stack from DCWV, which had to be set aside in favour of this album. This is another project to be taken up again in the New Year and worked on as time permits – no deadline on this, and it will be fun to work on.

I hope you have enjoyed the journey.

Recycled Mini-Album–Finishing the Cover

I wanted to create a traditional look to the cover of this book, so it would have a half-binding over the spine. To do this, I needed some strong material that would be thin so as not to produce too much bulk, flexible so that the book would open easily, and above all, strong, so that the hinges would not wear with use, and eventually split.

In my quest for a cheap (or better yet, free!) supply of Tyvek, I approached the builder who worked on our new house, and asked if he had any offcuts. He said they didn’t use Tyvek specifically, but another brand of roofing felt which had the same properties – a breathable waterproof membrane. I suspected that like Tyvek, this would be a bonded polyethylene material, which would probably melt and distort nicely with heat, and also be very strong. He gave me a nice big piece:

It is very like the “fabric” type of Tyvek in that it has a pattern on it resembling woven fabric, and has a soft handle, unlike the “paper” type of Tyvek which is a lot stiffer, and with a flat surface. This roofing felt is more suitable for this current project, in any case, than “paper” Tyvek. Close up, this is what the texture looks like:

On its own, it is far too flimsy to form the spine cover, which needed to be made from cardboard. I have quite a large supply of small pieces of corrugated cardboard that were originally in some food packaging, and I cut one of these down to the size of the spine, allowing a little extra to create a convex surface.

I rolled this piece around my rolling pin to get a nice smooth curve, and glued the edges to the edges of the spine, using Scotch Quick Dry Adhesive.

I cut a piece of roofing felt to cover the spine and to extend a little way onto both the front and back board of the book, and allowing for turnings top and bottom, to cover the edge of the corrugated cardboard and to provide a nice neat finish to the end boards of the cover.

This piece was then painted with black acrylic paint. I had to work the paint well into the texture in order to get good coverage.

The first coat completed, and set aside to dry.

Obviously I could not speed the drying process with my heat gun, or I would have ended up with this!

This was an experiment I did when I first got the roofing felt, to see how well it would melt with the heat gun. It melts just like Tyvek, creating lovely bubbles and holes, and I know I shall be able to use this – I have yet to try ironing it.

As for my book cover, it needed a second coat of paint, after which I was better pleased with it. It had a completely matt surface, which was also slightly rough, and it needed something to finish it. The faux leather also required some extra treatment, to protect it and to give it extra richness.

I took a small piece of roofing felt and painted part of it with black acrylic paint, and then divided it into four sections, in which I tested different finishes: acrylic wax, regular semi-gloss acrylic gel medium, and gloss acrylic varnish. The final section was left untreated. This is what it looked like when dry:

It is rather difficult to see the difference on the photo; all three treated surfaces had a greater or lesser degree of gloss, with the varnish being by far the shiniest – this was not what I wanted for this particular project. The feel of each one was greatly improved – less rough, and all of them brought out the texture to a greater or lesser degree. Definitely ahead of the rest was the acrylic wax – I had read great things about this product and was not disappointed.

Like gel mediums, it goes on milky white, having the consistency of thin cream. I brushed it in well, working it into the texture of the roofing felt, and left it to dry. When dry, I buffed it with a soft cloth to achieve a subtle sheen.

As for the faux leather, I took three small offcuts from the book cover and tested them with the same finishes, and again, it was the acrylic wax which won hands down.

After two coats and a good buffing with a soft cloth, I was well pleased with the result.

I glued the half-binding onto the book with PVA adhesive. Firstly I painted the outside of the corrugated cardboard spine with a watered down coat of PVA to seal it. I had a bit of a job getting the roofing felt to stick, but managed it with the aid of rubber bands, paperclips and plastic clips. Once dry, it seemed securely adhered.

I then attached the Tim Holtz embellishments – the book label that I had created with one of the small metal frames, and the metal corners. This is how the cover looks now, and it is the finished result, as I have decided against cluttering the traditional style with the addition of a fastening.

There is more than enough space between the signatures to allow for expansion with the addition of material in the album and I do not think the book will be too fat to stay closed – in fact I shall take great care that it does not, because one of my pet hates is albums that are so bursting with content that they will not stay closed, but splay open all the time!

Here is a detail of the embellishments, which also shows the sheen and texture of the faux leather.

I cut the roofing felt large enough to allow for small turnings into the inside of the spine, and inside the front and back cover. Here is a detail of the spine of the book. The edges of the corrugated cardboard are now covered.

Inside the cover you an see the turning of the half-binding, and also the two mini-brads which secure the book label to the front. You can also see the backs of the metal corners where I bent them around the book, and hammered them flat – they are also secured with some Scotch Quick Dry Adhesive.

Here is a detail of the turning of the half-binding inside the cover, and one of the corners.

The middle of the inside front and back covers needed to be filled to bring it up to the same level as the folded-in faux leather, so that when the end papers were added, they would lie as flat as possible. Also, I did not want the brads to make an impression on the end papers – these are quite thin, being made from recycled commercial envelope paper. I cut a couple of squares of recycled card (the same stuff I used to create the faux leather) to level things out, and stuck these down inside the covers with Scotch Quick Dry Adhesive.

On the left you can see a little rectangle of paper stuck down – this was to cover one of the brads from the book label embellishment.

Now I was ready at last to add the end papers. Again I used Scotch Quick Dry Adhesive, taking especial care with the edges and the centre fold, to make sure they were well stuck down.

I trimmed off the excess end paper from the first page of the book. Unfortunately I had not allowed for this when I stamped the music background onto the papers, because it meant that the image on the page that was trimmed was no longer in the middle – the front end paper wasn’t too bad but it was rather more obvious on the back one. Ah well, one lives and learns, and after all, this is a hand-made project and is bound to have one or two slightly “off” bits!

The final thing I did today was to stick together the innermost two pages of all but one signature (made from the smallest recycled cards) down their edges to create pouches for tags, using the ultra-sticky red-backed double-sided tape. The signature I omitted had a larger card in the centre so I thought I would leave that one as it was.

This completes the structure of the book. It just remains to touch up the rest of the pages where they had stuck together, and brush on some talc to prevent this happening again. Then I shall be ready to begin decorating it.

Vintage Backgrounds

I recently had access to some ancient parish records dating back to the 1600s, bound in a large vellum-bound book, and before the book had to be returned, I was able to scan a selection of the pages. Not only are they interesting from a historical point of view, but they are beautiful objects in themselves; the earlier generations thought that official documents should be beautiful as well as informative, and they went to great trouble to pen the most elegant copper-plate script, complete with flourishes and embellishments. What a shame that these days, such documents are written in often very poor handwriting, or typed; nobody has the time any more to take a pride in a mundane job and elevate it to the status of a work of art.

Leafing through the book, it was interesting to see how the style of handwriting changed over the years, and even the signature of a single individual would develop ever more elaborately as the years progressed.

These documents are great treasures – irreplaceable, beautiful, and fascinating as they trace the births, marriages and deaths of ordinary citizens throughout the centuries. Handling this book, I could imagine the clergymen who penned the lists of names, and the style of clothing they would have worn, and the sort of lives they and their parishioners would have led – a very far cry from our lives today.

These pages would make wonderful backgrounds and design elements in my art projects – I am just embarking on the whole new world of digital scrapbooking, and they have great potential! [Ed.: You can see that I have incorporated some of these into my blog background.]

Here are some samples of the pages.

This one is the first page in the book, and dates from 1678.

It is interesting how the black ink has gradually seeped through the paper over the centuries, so that a ghosting effect from the other side is visible.

This one is dated 1692.

In 1736 you can see a true copper-plate script developing.

1737:

1757:

1767:

Into the 19th century, here is one from 1813, the final entry in this volume, which is volume 3 – it is not known what has happened to the earlier volumes. Presumably subsequent volumes have been lodged in the county record office, which is where this book is destined.

I also scanned some of the endpapers, and the front and back covers of the book.

The marks on this page are the ink bleeding through from the writing on the reverse.

This is part of the front cover. The cover is made of vellum, and is wonderfully distressed.

This is the top part of the book, showing some of the binding:

and finally, this is part of the back cover.

I wish I could share with you the wonderful feel of this book; its weight, the stiffness of the paper, which crackles as you turn the pages, its textures – the paper is slightly striated as it would have been pressed probably between sheets of linen when it was made. The vellum cover is smooth, like silk, and the whole book has an aroma of antiquity. I really felt that I was holding history in my hands. What a privilege.