A big envelope came in the mail yesterday. I could hardly wait to open it as I suspected the theme of what was inside when I saw the name of the sender. As soon as I was home from the post office I put down my grocery bags in the middle of the kitchen floor and ripped open the envelope........
My suspicions came true. Out of the envelope floated books, images and papers......all about altered book art.
Ulla, who you can get to know yourself at ULLABENULLA ,has gathered treasures for me to help me up from my crawling position to my first baby steps.
And together with all the books and papers, Inspiration floated freely from the envelope (Ulla, thanks for filling it so generously). Inspiration took my hand and led me around in The House in the Woods, first to find a book to use for practice, next to show me that all the "stuff" I have collected through almost 50 years can be used. Then Inspirtaion helped me to clean a space at my desk and didn't leave untill she saw me make the first pages in my practice book - Letters of Love and Friendship.
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I have learned the first, most important and only rule of book art - PLAY, PLAY, PLAY, anything is allowed.
I have a long way to practice before I walk this book art steady, the practice will be along the road of playing and having fun.
While practicing I see that I already have many books which can be called altered book or book art. I call them my "klippe og lime-bøker" (cut and glue books). Here are three samplers.
A "klippe og lime-bok" where I show parts of my collections, or themes from them. Here the theme is bokmerker - bookmarks. I haven't dated the page, but I think it was made about 3 years ago.
This is the first page in an art scrapbook I started three years ago. Another page can be seen in this post from November 2005. (and here is a link to a scrap book Marta was working on some years ago)
This last photo is from a garden book I have been working on over the years.
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The first two photos are pages I played with last night, when Ulla's Inspiration came for a visit.
