Trying to clean up from artfest (still), and thinking about some collaborative deadlines looming, I was puttering about in my art room and revisited this. I love it when I still like something I made years (in this case 2) earlier...sometimes I really dislike a phase I was in, lots of times it has to do with the materials I chose...anyway, since I still like this little book that took over my art life for an obsessive few days, I thought you might like it too. I found this old photo album book at a flea market for $5.00...it had only the hinges and the two covers, no insides. I knew I had to have it, but I knew not what for (what else is new?). A little while later I found these great pages from a stained glass book...they were from some sort of Tiffany sample book that went home with people and had some high price on it if lost. (I pray that they no longer have a value, because I used them; I do fear ruining something of value, that's never my intention)
These pages just happened to fit perfectly inside the book-(I love the magic of art!) so I started to play on them and hinged them together accordian style with little scraps of velvet that I glued on them. You can see some of the stained glass drawing designs in the background on some of my pages. I had so much fun losing myself in the pages which have a front and back. Only the last page is actually attached to the cover, the rest just pull out from that. I used just enough pages to fill in the hinge size and then wired the hinges to the front cover. The one hinge was missing its long thin screw piece, so I put a hat pin in there which happened to work perfectly (again, that magic). I was pretty much thinking of childhood and family, the heavens and taking flight at the time, but no real "theme"...just lost myself in the playing. Gets the ideas flowing for my new collaborative, which of course I'll show you too. Here's the rest of the book: