Day One and 20 pages

This is Day One of my blog about altered stuff. You know, altered books, altered pages, altered paintings, altered jewellery (aka found object jewellery) and anything else I feel like changing to make it look like something else. Why alter stuff? Because I can and I love doing it.

Yesterday I altered two pieces of wood, some dowel, wire and bits of rubber to make them into a tool for making jump rings. I guess I could describe the process just as making art and stuff but referring to it as altering makes it sound more complex.

These photos are of an altered page project I worked on for a Book and Paper group I go to at Auchenflower. Each of us made an A4 double-sided page that had to include an image of ourselves somewhere on the page. We could do one and produce 20 copies of it or make 20 original pieces. I chose to make 20 different pages. The plan was to get one of everyone's pages and produce a book in whatever form we choose. The reason for making 20 was because there were supposed to be 20 people participating, although only 16 did in the end.

For my paper I chose to use A4 size sheets that I cut out of an atlas from the Lifeline Bookfest, which meant that I only had to work on one side of the paper. I then selected 5 B&W pictures of myself as a young child and some wildlife pictures also. It was fun playing around with stamps and painting techniques and with 20 pages to do I had lots of practice!

Here are the photos of some of the pages. They look a bit paler than the originals, but you can see how they turned out.