Book of Dreams...getting started {The Book}

Ok, let's get started here. First to answer a few questions that have come up. No, you absolutely do NOT have to have a blog to participate. If you really want to show off your pages, you could email them to me and I can post them here. Otherwise we'd love to hear through the comments section how everyone is doing and if you choose to post pictures on a blog, please send the link. If anyone has any questions that they want to ask me personally along the way you can reach me at artsy_mama@hotmail.com I will try to answer questions in the comments section as well.

Now lets talk about choosing a book to work in. You have several options here. If you absolutely cannot stand the thought of altering an actual book, you could use a blank journal or photo scrapbook like the one shown below. I purchased this at Borders bookstore and I love that it bound with the ribbon. That way you can add or subtract pages, it can get very chunky and there's plenty of room to grow. It also has nice heavyweight cardstock pages that are nice to work on for mixed media work.

In looking more closely at Citrus Faire's book (our inspiration for this challenge) it looks as if she just used the cover and back of a very old book and "gutted" it. She added the pages in after they were finished. Does anyone know a good way to do this? One technique I noticed that she used in another book, is she punched two or three holes in each of her pages, attached eyelets and bound them to the skeleton of the old book with ribbon. You can see it fairly easily on her work here.

Finally, you can alter an actual book that you find at a garage sale, estate sale, library sale, wherever. In using this technique you may want to glue two or more pages together (a glue stick works fine for this) to make them more sturdy and able to handle paint and/or heavy embellishments that you add. The book will definitely get very chunky and will not close after awhile, but that's part of the tactile fun of it all. One thing that's neat about using an actual book is that you can use paints and glazes (which we'll talk about later) that you can see the words through and that adds neat interest to your pages.

Check out this really, really cool book that Pam made using pieces of old books and putting them together accordian style. Wow!!

So the first task is to find what kind of book you want to work in. Then you may want to decide on what kind of interpretation of Book of Dreams you'd like to work with. As mentioned before, you could have the book a mixed media representation of your actual dreams you have, you could make it dreams that you aspire to achieve, or just inspiration in general. The sky is the limit! I love how Michelle said today that she's going to feature bits and pieces of her favorite poems. Great idea! I think it also would be reallly fun if people shared their interpretation of this theme in the comments section.

I plan to post each new technique on Wednesdays. Lastly, I wanted to mention that I am by no means an expert here. I look forward to all of sharing our thoughts and tips along the way. So if you have anything you'd like to mention, like what kind of book you've found works best, or doesn't work well, please email me or leave your thoughts in the comments section. I think we all really have a lot to offer one another and look forward to sharing this journey as a community of dreamers. Have fun hunting for a book and we'll see you back here!