One For the Books

I'm taking another online class ~ Full Tilt Boogie with Mary Ann Moss.  Her schtick is altered books and visual journaling.  And this is my first book, with a Sewn-On Tabs binding.  Primarily Mary Ann uses vintage photo albums and the like, but since they are absolutely not available in my area and too expensive for me to buy online, I'll be using regular old books.

For this first book in the class (which incidentally rolled out last summer although it's still available), I used a very old and falling apart book of large scale black & white photos.  I liked the old text on the cover, but it was bent and kind of floppy...so I cut one of the covers in half and recovered the pieces in batik fabric.  Some of the photo pages from the original book have been bound inside the new one...along with several of my early collages and tons of other old papers and pages.

Mary Ann is a gal after my own heart -- she likes things kinda funky and she uses stuff in her journals that other folks would likely keep stuck away in a drawer somewhere because of it's possible antique value.  As I am recycling early collages of mine, which are housed in their original sketchbooks in a growing stack that I rarely look at anymore.  Why not use them? especially when paper is so expensive.