Tags for Art exchange

These are the tags that I made for an art exchange. The theme was 'Vintage Children'. Just last week I found some old musicbooks. One of them was of Dutch children's songs. I used pages of that book as a background. The images came from old postcards and were colour photo copied. I also added old dictionary pages (no need to distress pages for an aged look...) red silk paper and some lace.
I like the simplicity of tags, they are ideal to use as a base for collages and they add interest to altered books as well. The tags were sent out to Holland, England and Australia.

Book of Dreams ready for the Round Robin

The Book of Dreams is (almost) ready for the Round Robin. There will be some decorations added when the book comes home in 9 months.
On the cover I glued a digital collage from my photographs, on the book after adding sheer organza which was stitched with thread and some small beads.
The inside has a medium-transfer (layers of Golden Medium on a print, rubbing the paper off) of on old collage that I made a while ago.
The flap holds an envelope with a little note for the people who will add their work to my book.

Turning the envelope will show the title page with another copy of the collage, behind some organza again. I like that 'dreamy' effect.
The book is made from pastepaper, so there is a lot of colour and texture in the book. I binded not only 'whole' pages, but also pages that were cut back to a few centimetres and this forming a 'stub'. These stubs are ideal to create more space between the pages and allow bulky pages.
I also like them for adding a different page, e.g. a sheet of silkpaper, or adding an envelope or tags. In this spread I used an open paper sort, glued on the stub.

The image is made from al sort of images, the picture of the hand comes from http://www.morguefile.com/ , a free source of images. This is the first page of the spread.

The second page from the spread that I made. And finally the sign-in pages were two pouches will hold the sign-in tags.

New book binded for next Round Robin

Shakti from Spain proposed to start a Round Robin in which we would go completely over the top regarding the artwork and embellishments, we call it the Crazy RR, but will decide on the theme individually.
Seems like a good challenge. Instead of altering an existing book, I decided to bind a complete new book.

This is the cover of the book before adding the decorations. The threads (barely visible here) were sewed in on the spine to add some beads.
I used pastepapers as signatures so that there was not one empty white page in the book. Also I added some 'stubs' as spacedivider, but also to add extra tip-ins, envelopes, tags etc. to the book.

And here is the top view of the book. I do not need many pages, there are only 14 of them, plus 20 stubs.

Round Robin Peace and Hope

This is the cover of my book for the Round Robin 'Peace and Hope' from the ABEurope group (on Yahoo).
This book will be sent to 7 other artitsts around Europe who will create artwork in my book.
This is the inside of the book with the titlepage: Whisperings of peace. Peace is so fragile, whether you are talking about peace in the world or finding peace inside yourself.

This is the first spread that I made before I sent it away. For some reason I kept it quite simple, it seems to fit the theme pretty well.

Puzzle pieces for art exchange

These puzzle pieces were made for an art exchange. I send them to Australia, England and here the Netherlands. In return I received some great artwork from the participants.

The pieces came from a childrens puzzle. The pieces were sanded, painted and then collaged. I rubbed in some bronze paint (not visible on the photo) to deepen the colour. Some fiber was added for texture.