This year Bevlea Ross and Barb Thomas allowed me to host a Collab Book swap for Paperarts online Yahoo Group. My first as host and an interesting experience, intriguing, frustrating, exciting and all those myriad of emotions that come along with hosting a rather large swap.
As I love green, I decided on a ‘Surrounding Wonders of Nature’ theme. Rules were to use greens and/or blues and have texture somewhere on the page. This time I decided to forego my usually ‘look’ of layers of paint and gloss. Instead chose a simplified version of images instead using dimensional magic, gauze, sand texture gel and chipboard to create my texture. Each participant also had to make their own front and back covers, naturally adhering to the theme, green and/or blue and texture, texture, texture. My cover page above I wanted to keep clean and simple and just used tissue paper to create my texture. My inner page below created using images mostly, with sand texture gel and gloss.
All in all, this was a fantastic swap to be a party of. The participants pages exceeded my expectations.
I was blown away by the creativity, but most importantly the amount of work that went into each page to create the various techniques. You’ll notice some pages are quite ‘busy’, others are less so, but one aspect is consistent throughout; every woman put in a concerted effort to produce the specified requirements ‘using texture’. You can clearly see the time, labour and love exercised in creating their nature themes & ‘texture’.
Unfortunately a scanned image does not do even half the justice these pages deserve and you lose so much of the 3D and minute detail, so I hope those that belong to stamping groups or get together with fellow crafters, I’d encourage you to show off your book for others to see it ‘in the flesh’. It’s well worth the look.
Ruth, I love your work, it is so beautiful..... love the green! My favourite colour as well. Margaret Weiss
Posted by: Margaret Weiss | 17 July 2009 at 02:34 PM