Altering a desk diary into a note book

As I had hoped, I DO have something to show, so a new blog.

I was given a couple of desk diaries by my son in law. He is given lots of them every year by different clients and some of them are very substantial and expensive hard backed books - too good to go unused. I was given them to see if they were of use to me.

I didn't need another diary for this year but as I said too good to go unused so I decided to convert one into a note book.

First I made a cover for the book which you can see here.

I used pelmet Vilene as the base. I mixed some diluted PVA and sized the Vilene before I glued some scrunched tissue paper all over the surface. I used old dress pattern tissue - thanks to Lynda for this idea. I have a huge stash of this.

Next I cut some butterflies and flowers from a scrap piece of net curtain. I really must make a visit to a fabric and curtain store and source some oddments of nets and lace. They are such a useful source of relief designs.

I free machined these onto the surface of the 'tissued' background. There are also some of the flowers down the spine of the book.

I painted the whole surface with black Gesso. I bought the black Gesso recently and I am so glad I did. It is so useful.

When this was dry I sprayed the surface with Mystic Malachite Moon Shadow Mist. Gorgeous colour and effect.

When this was dry I finger brushed Golden Interference Oxide Green (BS) onto the raised surface of the butterflies. This oxide green interference is the exact same colour as the Mystic Malacite - one is in liquid spray form and the other in paint form.

I used a Krylon gold leafing pen to highlight the inner butterfly wings and its body and also the raised flowers. I added beads to the flower centres and a cluster of beads for the thorax of the butterflies. It is a good idea to wear finger protection as stitching through this surface is tough.

I machined all the edges with satin stitch and a matching rayon machine thread. I placed the book onto the cover and turned the ends in and stitched them to hold.

I would be dividing the book into sections for notes on different things so I wanted to make some way of finding the sections easily. There was already a red ribbon book marker attached to the book so I decided to make some more and make tags for them all.

Again I used pelmet Vilene and cut out raindrop shapes.

I cut more of the flowers from the net curtain and machined them onto the raindrop shapes. They were treated in the same way as the book cover.

I mixed some bronzing powder with a medium and dipped the edges of the raindrop tags. I also highlighted the flowers.

I attached the tags to the red ribbons.

Now that the cover was complete, I began to alter the inside. I needed to erase the dates and calendars on all the pages.

I painted them out with acrylic paints using as many different colours as possible. I had to do this a few pages at a time to allow the paints to dry so that they would not stick together.

When they were dry I used gel pens and doodled a different pattern on every page.

I have not finished this task yet. Still a lot more pages to paint. It is also a challenge to create so many different patterns.

These are just a few of them so far.

I can now begin to to use the book.

I am continuing to create an image a day and spent some time photographing one of the pieces from my Lewis chess set. I love the knight.

I had a little play with this image using some special effects and came up with this.

I would rather like to use this effect and at the moment I am trying to work out how to obtain this metallic effect. It looks a bit like hammerite paint!

This image I created recently for my image a day is very tempting and I have the foundations of an idea how to interpret it.

I love the colours

Now I must decide what I am going to do next and I will blog again when I have created something else, until then

cheers everyone.