Bargains and an altered book

We have a local garden centre which after lengthy negotiations has finally sold out to big business and will shortly be demolished to add more huge superstores to our local out of town shopping area. They have a large craft department and when I drove past a few weeks ago to see a banner with the magic words ‘75% off all stock’ I couldn’t resist!

By the time I got through the doors, everything was very, very well picked over, but the girls and I went methodically digging like hardened boot sale veterans, going for all sorts of weird and wonderful things that we wouldn’t normally have bought, but which at a quarter of the price on the label were a snip.

At the checkout, the till rang up almost £300, which was a nasty moment until the final buttons were pressed and our huge hoard came in at a mere £70 odd. In fact, the girls and I got so excited about our treasures, including: gel mediums, beads, findings, journaling tags, inks, water colour pencils, lino, stencils, embossing medium, card, paper, stickers, fabric dyes, buttons etc. etc that we went back the next day too! They were moving out some of the shop fittings and I discovered that all sorts of things had fallen under and behind them – packs of acrylic paints, canvases, pens and pencils, even a whole box of watercolour pads. We stocked up big time!! In fact, another £80+ big time. I do love bargains and even more when it gives me the opportunity to experiment with things I wouldn’t normally buy.

Time to play and turn a 1927 York Minster Pilgrim’s Book I bought in a second hand book shop into an altered book with some of my new goodies.

First, embossing paste through a brass medieval style stencil I already had.

Then I used a leafy stencil on some off-cuts of card…

…which made me think of leafy Green Man heads, so I googled a picture of one of the York Green Men, printed it out and used a gel transfer medium to transfer the image onto the page.

I like the slightly distressed fragmented look. I used the embossed leaf sections to frame the page, gave it a wash of green water-based oil pastels and then enhanced the Green Man With ink pens and shimmer watercolour in copper.

Something very different and so much fun. My middle one is altering a book too and we’ve agreed to put aside an hour on a Friday after school to work on our creations and share ideas and supplies. Looking forward to some hopefully ring-fenced creative time.