Head in a book...

Hello everyone!  I was so thrilled to be chosen as the Design Winner for the Craft Stamper Take It and Make It December challenge.  There's already been a feature on the Craft Stamper blog (Q&A here if you're interested) and I'm so excited that my Christmas Story Book will be published in the magazine.  And as if that weren't enough, I'm also very honoured today to be offering up some inspiration for the new TIMI theme - Text Me! - which is to use a text background, some script stamping or some text paper on your project.

Given my winning piece took the form of an altered book cover, I thought this time I would dive inside a book, so here are my journalling pages in an old unwanted hardback book.  I was one of those children accused of always having my head in a book.  Well, now I've found a new way to have a head in a book!

I made this around the same time as my Hidden in a Book creation for the PaperArtsy round-ups just before Christmas... I was on a roll with the whole book niches thing I think!

There's a shimmer of gold across the whole page spread, which makes it tricky to photograph of course.  It's created with a combination of DecoArt Media Fluid in Metallic Gold and Treasure Gold gilding wax in White Fire.














For this niche, we have another PaperArtsy image - this time a Lynne Perrella stamp, adorned with gilded hair ornaments.  As I did with the last one, I stamped the image on tissue paper in order to get it inside my carved niche.














It really helps to move the thing around in different lights to show the effects - but I've still not progressed to videos, so you'll have to make do with extra photos as usual!













The gilding wax is great at picking out the texture of the Crackle Paint Harlequins which dance across the page.












Obviously, we have my favourite blue and brown combination at the heart of it all.  This time I created the soft blended colours of the first layer with Fresco paints.













I like to work with watery washes and some paper towel/baby wipes standing by, so that I can apply paint and wipe back repeatedly until I'm happy with what I've got.












Next I added some heavy gesso with a palette knife for some extra texture...















... before heading in with some darker tones of both paint and sprays...














... always making sure not to neglect the interior of the niche.  It would be no good keeping that pristine - you need some depth behind the tissue paper to come.















Wanting some highlights, I started out with pure DecoArt Metallic Gold, but the tone was a little too brassy for my liking with this particular colour combination.














So I began to apply White Fire Treasure Gold over it, and again played around until it looked okay to me.

In addition to the LP image, I stamped some Hot Picks branches as well as a PaperArtsy Mini of some medieval calligraphy.














The sentiment is from Robert Frost's The Road Not Taken, a poem I've loved for as long as I can remember... so it's lovely to have it available as a stamp in one of the PaperArtsy Urban Snapshots Nature plates.















Some white splatter?  Don't mind if I do, thank you very much.  I never tire of how it seems to add life and depth to a piece.














I'm really happy with the textures and the overall atmosphere of the pages.

And despite all the paint and alterations, I promise there are still places where you can see the text paper underneath.







I hope you'll be inspired to play along at Craft Stamper this month.  There's more inspiration over at the Craft Stamper blog, of course, where the amazing team have been in action.

For now, I'd like to say a huge thank you to them and to Trish for this fantastic opportunity, and I'll wish you all a wonderful weekend.

When a book and a head collide and a hollow sound is heard, must it always have come from the book?
Georg Christoph Lichtenberg