little books still traveling...

Vacation is... finally finding the time to blog again...

It's not that I don't have anything that I would love to tell or to show you, but the last months I had the feeling I was running behind deadlines constantly...

June wasn't any better with working on the schoolreports for the children and the last 14 days I've been creating several creative projects for collegues who are leaving our school looking for another direction in their teachers life.

I hope to be able to show you one of the projects in a coming blog...

In january 10 ATC books left for a journey for several months in our local round robin.

The journey was not easy : people moved, others bought a house,people were not feeling well... so the 3 weeks deadline wasn't always made and books got stuck in some houses...

BUT.. they are still moving, not in their planned journey, but moving, so that's good :)

Suddenly three books arrived at my door...

I was in the middle of the hectic schoollife of june, but I took the time to create in each book. It also was a moment to de-stress...

First ATC-book I worked in was my mom-in-laws and her theme was "summerflowers and their visitors".

We sadly haven't seen much butterflies in the garden yet ( bad spring ? ...), so I made them come alive in paper.

The ATC-books were send on completed with all the little enveloppes sewed in, but they are all white so the participants can ink, paint, draw,... on them.

Every other enveloppe has also a heart cut on the front that was made with a mover and shaperdie  in the enveloppedie before the enveloppes were sewed in.

I had a vellum paper with butterflies on. I cut it with the enveloppedie and glued it over the original enveloppe that was stamped with a text stamp.

In the middle you can still see the heartopening.

For the closures on the back I stamped with permanent on shrinkpaper with a butterfly and dragonfly stamp.

The holes to sew them on were made before shrinking. 

I love to make little embellishments like this with shrink paper. No store-bought ones for me... give me a stamp and shrinking paper and I make one :)

In a workshop I gave I teached the participants how to make waxpaper.

One of the papers was musicpaper stamped with butterflies in permanent black ink. 

They were colored with distress stains and then the whole paper was waxed with beeswax.

When the paper is saturated, there is as much wax melted off again with a heatgun and that leaves you with ... waxpaper...

I cut one of these waxed butterflies out of the paper and mounted it with 3D foam on the enveloppe ( I used glossy accents to strenghten the binding of the tape because of the wax...).

Flowerstems were used to make the mandibulae.

In the enveloppe is this ATC.

A collaged poppyflowerstamp stamped with permanent ink and colored with distress stains. The flower was covered with glossy accents to make it pop.

On the back of the ATC, more butterflies: stamped and inked, but also a torn piece of the waxpaper with the butterflies.

The wings were partly cut out and a foamdot was added. This makes the butterfly dimensional and you can see the stamped background of the ATC under it's wings.

I also love how the paper becomes translucent in the waxingproces and how it reveals a bit of the background.

Rita's ATC book is all about inks, pens, pencils, writing,...

I imagined how she got a special enveloppe sended from far away....

The original enveloppe was covered with an enveloppe cut out of old ledgerpaper.

I added some stamps with red ink and red embossingpowder.

The ATC has a stamp with (Egyption?) writing. 

I added more poststamps in red, a inkpot and a real pen.

On the back a special specimen.. a butterfly... luckily not a real one, but again a piece of the selfmade waxpaper with the butterflies :)

You can see here how I repeated the previous technique of partly cutting out the wings of the waxed butterflies and putting them on foam.

The last book I worked in was Jenny's.

Her theme was "dresses of the twenties".

I digged out one of my fashionmagazines of the 1900 and tore a page out of it..... Maybe a shame to use it... but now it has got a new life :)

Same procedure here: covering the original enveloppe with a new paper ( new... it's only 100 years old...)

I stamped on it with lace stamps in blue and overinked the whole paper lightly with distress ink.

For the closures I stamped with the lacestamp in pink, punched out a circle and covered it three times with UTEE to make it look like a real button.

This time the heart-opening on the front was not covered, but cut out.

I stamped with pink stazonink on packaging plastic and added it on the inside of the enveloppe.

Now I have a see-through to have a peek on the inside, but it's also a bit hidden by the lace...

This ATC houses in the enveloppe.

No twenties dresses without a real seamstress ! The stamp was embossed with adirondack embossing powder.

On the back of the ATC again a piece of the old magazine. I whitewashed it with white distressstain.

I added a girl with a dress from 1910 and some white and black rub-ons.

These ATC books already left my house to continue their journey.

Just a few weeks to go and then they will be home again ! 

greetings from Belgium

Inge