still covered in glue

last night i suddenly realized that easter is in two weeks and my house is not one bit decorated! so i dug out last year's crazy ridiculous glitter eggs (which fueled my hatred for martha) and displayed them happily in their bird cage. i continued to shake my fist at martha as glitter fell everywhere and then decided they weren't quite enough decor.

my mother in law recently suggested i try decorating some eggs and add them to my shop. i'm obviously much too late for this easter but hopefully by next easter i'll have perfected a technique or two and be able to list some eggs!

i had eggs left from last year as well as some plastic eggs & a bag of tiny paper mache eggs that i bought this year so i pulled out the mod podge, some paper, fabric and assorted other madness  i have a few dictionary pages (ok...hundreds...maybe thousands?) left from the crazy book project as well as the innards of some freshly chopped up books that will soon become purses and i thought some book page eggs would be fun! 

a few hours, lots of mod podge and many ripped up pieces of paper later we have a fun little bowl of eggs:

 i have determined a few things about this project and i will share them with you. 

first: the little plastic eggs that split open should only be used with a thick covering. see the green polka dot egg? that one was mod podged fabric (so fun) but you can see the line. so for fabric and thin paper only use paper mache eggs. 

second: if using a rectangle of some sort (paper, fabric, book) to cove the egg the measurements will frustrate you. going around the egg is easy but accounting for the tapered top and bottom was more difficult. i cut slits so that i could fold the pieces in - instead of mashing them down and promising bubbles. this worked well except then there was too much paper/fabric at the tip of the egg. i kept going back and forth between not covering the tip and creating a point with too much material. perhaps the solution is to cut every other strip a bit shorter. we shall see.

last: the wrapped eggs were the most fun to make because i didn't have to think them as much, but they're time consuming. i did a tiny one with hemp i use for jewelry, a large one with some pretty substantial jute and the two green ones are strips of fabric. one is folder to give it a nice edge, the other is just frayed madness. 

one more note: all paper eggs were done with matte mod podge, as were the fabric eggs. for the hemp and jute i used good ol' aleene's tacky glue. 

sorry for the lack of pictures- one is the best i could do while covered in glue at midnight! i'll be trying more of these soon so stay tuned!

altering a (giant) book

this past weekend i attended the wedding of a friend from honeyrock. to say that she and her husband love books would be an understatement. their wedding invitation was a wonderfully unique "book" complete with a library book pocket and due date card. the program at the ceremony was also a book; complete with copyright information for their love story.

so as stephanie and i were thinking of something creative to give them we had the idea to make them a book. originally it was going to be a scrapbook filled with marriage advice from all of our honeyrock friends from around the country (and world!). we sent out an email asking for people to send 8x8 pages or email advice. at some point (i think the day before the wedding) i saw a link to this tutorial to create a binder from an old book. PERFECT! what better to give this couple than a book of their own? one they could put on the shelf with all their other books. but that left me with less than 24 hours (and less than 12 hours until stephanie's flight got in) to find an awesome book and figure out how to make it into a binder then insert all the pages. 

so i took an extended lunch break and headed to goodwill & the local thrift store to try to find a book that would accommodate a binder spine. the tutorial told me to use a 3x5 card binder spine, but i knew that wouldn't hold the pages people sent. at goodwill i found a book about birds that i thought might work so i coughed up the $1.79 for it (plus a few old reader's digest volumes to turn into purses). then i decided to check out twice as nice and there i hit the jackpot. 

seriously. JACKPOT. this dictionary is from 1966. normally $1.50. had a blue dot. thus 50% off. total price for greatest book ever : 75 cents!!!

this baby is going to be helping me make projects for years to come! but back to this project. i removed all the pages from the book (and saved them for future fun) and followed the directions from the tutorial to cover the spine with the endpapers. the columns of fantastic useful information about indo-european languages and metric conversions fit perfectly in the spine. 

 

next i found a binder spine from an old winnie the pooh photo album that contained photos from junior high and my wonderful husband drilled some holes & attached the binder piece to the spine. the tutorial suggests attaching it to the back page, but i wanted it in the middle so to the spine it went. then i went to fetch stephanie from the airport. we returned, poured ourselves some wine and happy creative chaos ensued.

paper and dictionary pages were everywhere for hours! sorry for the terrible photo- it was very late and very dark. some of the pages were just simple, others were exactly what people sent and others were a decoupaged mass of words and photos. we found specific words in the dictionary: melissa, david, wedding, marriage, love, etc. we tore up pages randomly. we stayed up cutting and gluing and crafting until we couldn't sit up anymore. saturday morning we packed ourselves up for the drive to milwaukee. after some last minute additions to the book it was finished!

a wonderful wedding present full of pictures, memories and words of love and advice from people all over the world. this was one of the most exciting and crazy projects i've ever completed. i loved it and as soon as i find myself another giant dictionary i'll be altering another book!