Amazing Nature

Hello all!  What a quiet March it was... well, quiet here at Words and Pictures, and anything but quiet in my other life.  Sometimes the words take over, but I'm really happy to be back at the pictures now - starting with my springtime Up at Dawn tag and now, with a new challenge starting over at Mini Album Makers, I'm delighted to be sharing some inspiration for that.

My brilliant teammates have been creating marvels to inspire you, so do take a look over at the Mini Album Makers Challenge blog, and we hope you'll come and play along.  As always, any handmade book is welcome.

I'm still working away from home, so with the limited supplies at hand I decided to go with a simple accordion construction for this month's handmade book.









Owing to a delay in supply lines, I had to go with my second choice of stamps for the inner pages in the end, but I don't mind so much now it's finished.














At least the stamps I'd wanted to use (Tim's new insects) have now arrived, so I'll be able to take them home with me and play with them there....













I started by cutting a page of watercolour paper in half vertically and then pleating both the resulting strips and gluing them together to make a nice long accordion.











I did it by eye rather than measuring it out - I'm not much for measuring!  Each "page" is about an inch and a half wide and the book is about 4.5 inches tall.  (The watercolour paper was 12x9 to start with.)

I used a recycled coffee cup sleeve to cut textured panels to fit the front and back covers...












... and then glued down torn sections of book page text across the inner pages.

Next up were strips of tissue tape, followed by a wash of gesso.















And then some torn fragments of teabag paper over the top of that...













... followed by drips and dribbles of  watercolour paint in a soft turquoise.  I used my fingertips, a water mister, and a brush to spread the colour around in pools across the background layers.














I then did the same with some of my Walnut drawing ink (one of my favourite new purchases here in NYC), with extra splatters too...











... before adding some Small Talk stickers in various places.  They had to be very short phrases as they're such narrow pages.

As I said, I really wanted to use Tim's new insects to add stamped detail to my pages, but the deadline was looming and they still hadn't arrived so I ended up compromising.

Instead, I used the fabulous new Andy Skinner fossils - the only problem was that the images are on a larger scale, so they had to be partial stampings on my tiny pages.  Still, I think it's pretty effective. 








And I did have with me one of Tim's older insects from his Oddities stamp set, so I added that to the mix too.
















The coffee sleeve covers got a rough wash of gesso to highlight the texture.  This is the back cover, left unadorned...
















... and I layered up a book page fragment, a scrap of teabag paper and some frayed muslin onto the front cover...















... topped with a butterfly from the Idea-ology Botanical Layers pack.

Some fine twine, glued beneath the layered cover decoration, forms the fastening for my little accordion album, and that's pretty much that.














Do come and play along at Mini Album Makers this month - there's lots more inspiration for you over there.







Our sponsor for April is Gypsy Soul Laser Cuts (I didn't have any with me, but you can see some of their fabulous chipboards in action here on my January album)...

... so you'll be in with a chance of a great prize package, or you could be selected as one of our highlighted winners and invited to guest design with us in the future. 

Thanks so much for stopping by today.  I'll see you again soon, either here or elsewhere in Craftyblogland.

Oh, and a very happy Easter to you all, of course, however you may celebrate it, or not!











What we do see depends mainly on what we look for. ... In the same field the farmer will notice the crop, the geologists the fossils, botanists the flowers, artists the colouring, sportsmen the cover for the game. Though we may all look at the same things, it does not all follow that we should see them.
John Lubbock