I'm not sure if anyone is interested in reading about the process of my journal pages, but I thought it might be fun to record one.

I woke up early this morning and was told to quit moving around, so I thought I would do something in one of my books. I really had no ideas, so I grabbed one of my journaling books, Altered Books, Collaborative Journals, and Other Adventures in Bookmaking by Holly Harrison and opened it at random, thinking that I would try to incorporate at least one thing from what I found on the page into my journal or one of my altered books. This is the page I wound up with. I grabbed my journal and headed upstairs.

The page on the left appealed to me, but not for a journal page. I've been working in a red, white and black altered book for quite a while now. I usually use found text in this one. First I looked for some words that I could work with and circled them with a grey colored pencil because we have a pencil-stealing gremlin in this house and no matter how many I buy there is never one when I need it. There must be one at school too, because neither I, nor any of my seventh-graders ever has one. But I digress. After finding the words, I spread some red fluid acrylic paint with a sponge on the edges of the spread. Then I painted in antique white around the words with a brush and then dry brushed the rest of the spread in antique white. At this point I sat the book aside to dry, intending to sketch a woman on the right page.

I picked up my journal and thinking I might turn an interesting piece of a red magazine photo into something similar to the heart on the right photo of Harrison's book, I got to work. The left page of my spread was a piece of an old German book that I sewed into the compo book when I reconstructed it. The pages are really fragile and I had forgotten to strengthen them when I did the first side, so I grabbed some masking tape and went all around the edges of the page. For good measure I added some to the right page too.

Since I was doing a red heart and I had some read paint on my pallet still, I spread it on the right page and worked some into the masking tape on the left side. It looked pretty flat, so I dry brushed some antique white on both pages. The texture was starting to happen

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I started this post two days ago and had my computer freeze up. Luckily Blogger now does lots of mini saves. Unfortunately, I've totally lost my train of thought and have no idea how I planned on finishing the post. Rather than start over, I thought I'd just post this.

Today is my last totally unencumbered day before school starts back next week. I've been upstairs making mail art all morning and now I need to clean the house a bit. The mail art is a lot of fun, I'll probably pop back up and work on it some more too.