Hope y'all had a safe night and a fun time. We staid home and laid low, actually fell asleep about 20 minutes before midnight.
Ok now I can show you what I worked on in December. Well I started typing the first of Nov. But, after I had typed in 12 pages I did a goof and lost it all. That is no small feat as I type rather slowly, looking at the keyboard the whole time. I was making a memory book for our daughter. About 11-12 years ago she gave us a book of questions about what it was like when we were growing up, and said she would like us to answer the questions. I'm glad that I sat down at that time to answer most of the questions over a years time. I kept them thinking I would type the answers up and give them back to her. This was the year!
After I typed in all of our "stories" , reread them, made adjustments so the pages flowed well, I printed them out. I was going to "decoupage" them to watercolor paper, so I felt that I needed to get them copied so the ink form our printer wouldn't run. Now I'm ready to start getting the book together.
I took a piece of white muslin, ironed well, and put a coating of gesso on it. I did some texture in the gesso, but in the end it really didn't show up much.
Here I sprayed purple paint and started to color wash blue. That's when I found the gesso wasn't dry yet. This was the hardest part, always letting things dry overnight.
As you can see I got impatient with the dry in your own time, and tried to speed things along with a hair dryer.
I lightly numbered my pages so that I could put them back in the correct order. I had three signatures, using two sheets of watercolor paper folded in half for each signature.
I used water colors to paint the edges of the watercolor paper.
I used matte gel medium to coat the watercolor pages (one at a time) then put my trimmed typed pages on top.
Yes I got some bubbles and wrinkles. So I rolled the paper out using my brayer. That helped, but in the end some of the pages still had some wrinkles. I guess that's what makes it special.
Then another coat of matte gel on top of the printed page to seal it.
Drying time again... no short cuts this time. Overnight was needed here.
Next day it was on to the back side of each page. Again I had numbered both the watercolor paper AND the printed pages. I never would have had them in the correct order if I hadn't done that.
Drying AGAIN.
Back to the cover. I decoupaged some of the pictures on the cover, along with the title. Again using matte gel medium.
Here I am stenciling on the cover with Lumiere gold paint. When that was dry I went over the edges of the stencil with a black gel pen.
After looking up on the Internet I now knew how to sew the signatures together and bind them into the cover. Here is the card board (I used left over mat board) I cut to the size needed, a front, back and a spine.
After trimming the cover to the size needed, I glued it to the cardboard. Yes it's drying time again!
Here I am sewing the signatures together. I used strips of silk organza to tie the signatures to the cover. I tried to use what I had instead of searching for the correct items. Time was getting short!
Here I've glued the signatures via the organza strips to the cover. Properly propping up the signatures until dry... LOL.
Here I have wrapped the cover fabric over the cardboard on the inside. Yes drying time AGAIN!
Finally DONE, just in time, the day before we were to leave for our daughters. PHEW I didn't count on having to wait so long for things to dry! I was sweating this one. Yes our daughter LOVED it!
