Thursday, 2 September 2010

Purple Beastie star book








This week's colour challenge is lavender purple, which is another gorgeeeooouus colour but one where the inspiration was hard to find. Yes, i can surely smell the heady scent of lavender but how do you paint that?! I DID overdose once on lavender essential oil because of my love of its aroma...fresh and uplifting for sure! :) Being unaware of its blood pressure lowering abilities and with an already low blood pressure...well you can work out the rest :)
As with the colour challenge so far I've been given the opportunity and excuse to try out new things that I have never quite gotten round to and this week is no exception...I've gone for yet ANOTHER book but a star one this time...wish I'd come up with the design as its so simple but effective.
As for the "beasties" theme....I can't actually tell you where that came from! Lets call it Divine intervention :) Turned out a bit more cutsie than I had planned...but can't win them all hey?!
There's some photos below showing the process if you're interested, this was by far the fiddliest thing I've done in a while..but I must have enjoyed it as no sweary words passed my lips!
The star book is all in the layers of paper folded at different lengths to give you that 3 D effect.

The length of paper with the largest sized folds forms your back canvas so remains "whole", the medium and smallest sized folds sit on top...so its trying to work out which bits to cut out and which bits to leave....i found this the tricky fiddly bit!
Now painted purple with black pen added....lovely wooden floor clash!! :)
Now sewing where the three layers of paper meet at the folded points,(using pamphlet stitch) this keeps it all together.
I've glued on some heavy cardboard on either end to form the front and back covers for when the book is closed. The cardboard can be covered with whatever suits, I've just used bits cut from a magazine featuring a bit of leaves and pink/purple petals.
Here we have it, done and dusted...the jobs a good 'un! :)

7 comments:

  1. this is so beautiful! i cannot wait to get started on my lavender piece for the color challenge! you've inspired me! and i am so happy to have found your beautiful blog and can't wait to stop back again!

    best wishes to you!
    juliette

    ReplyDelete
  2. Awww thank you ladies :) And thanks for joining me too Juliette! ( I also must add a HUGE thankyou to all the other followers that have joined me recently.) While i slowly navigate my way through blogdom and listen closer to my creative whispers, I can't tell you how much my heart sings when your words of encouragement and support grace my blog! So in return i send a heartfelt awe filled sparkling thankyou THANKYOU THAAAAANK YOOOOOOU! XX :)

    ReplyDelete
  3. Another lovely book. You have some wonderful concepts in your books that have my eyes oggling. Great stuff.

    Thanks for sharing.

    Nutty
    (silently pleading that her youngest stay asleep this time)

    ReplyDelete
  4. this is different to how I did mine. I had to create signatures and it took a very long time, but yours is so lovely and I can see you put in an insane amount of time with all the cut outs and the painting. You are one talented lady, Mrs. Jenny Blair...*rolling that R*

    ReplyDelete
  5. Thankyou for your lovely comments Nutty and Jax!
    Nutty, hope you manage to get some me-time while your babe sleeps, or is it just sleep you dream of?! I remember the days of constant feeding and sleepless nights VERY well :)
    Jax, did you use your amazing photos for your starbook? Oooh, I'd like to see that!? And you arrre so rrrright! You've cerrrrtainly got to rrrrrolll those Rrrrrrrr's! :) XX

    ReplyDelete
  6. Wonderful! I love this book!
    I didn't know that lavender oil can lower blood pressure - must pass that on to my mum who has high blood pressure
    Rett

    ReplyDelete