Don't Get Jittery on Me--Part 4, or "The Big, The Small, The Garish"

Today's session started out innocently enough, but then I stumbled upon a garish foil greeting card in my box of "antique treasures." It wound up changing the direction of this altered book. But more about that momentarily.

I started confidently. Big! Having roughed out the structure of the book in the last three sessions, I was ready to fill in some blanks, starting with the first window, shown in Part II of this saga here: http://lauratringaliholmes.blogspot.com/2013/03/dont-get-jittery-on-me-part-ii-or.html. (If you're new to this series, the window is on the right page, under the side porch of the house.) I started by test-driving a large acetate that I had printed out a year ago and buried in a file of big things. Big! I was feeling the scale.

But I also fished around for other alternatives to fill in the window, and that is how I stumbled upon the garish greeting card, which was part of a two-shoebox load of old stuff bought for dollars at a going-out-of-business consignment-shop sale. "Why the heck not?" I mumbled to myself, and slapped it in the window for the purposes of self-argument.

Not quite what I had in mind for the very beginning of my book, but I would come back to the card, oh yes I would. So I went with the big transparency to fill the window, cutting it down to fit, and this is what it looked like from the front.

The cool thing about using a transparency in a window is that when you flip the page over, the transparency frames whatever is behind it, creating another opportunity to make an artistic statement. This is the page flipped over, so you can see what I mean. Whatever I glue there will look innocent at first, but when the reader flips the page, presto...a focal point.

Ordinarily I would have taken some time to trim out the edges of the window on both sides, but there was a current running between me and the garish card so I picked that up next and started to play around with incorporating it. Even though it was shiny. Even though its accents were luridly, royally blue.

As it happened, I liked how the card fit in the porthole that I had cut in Stage II. I especially liked how the fortune-teller's globe echoed the shape of the porthole. I liked the idea of concealing the card beneath the catbird flap to tone down--at least a little--all that shine. I liked how the edge of the card would stick out and become a sort of tab, or handle. I liked how the handle part said "cheer." That seemed like kind of a nice vibe, and different for me. I usually don't go for cheer in my work.

And best of all? I loved that the card has a little interactive door, which reveals the greeting when opened. How perfect for my altered book!

But how to incorporate the card? For the placement of the card to work within the porthole, it had to be attached in the middle of nowhere. Of course I could have simply glued the card in place, but I wanted both the front and the back of the card to show. I turned to a method I've used before, another type of tip-in. Here, for your edification, is a picture of a page in a book I made ages ago that uses this construction. That book was called "The Princess Diary." No cheer there, oh no. But see how the image is sandwiched between trimmed book pages?

That is the engineering I used to get the garish greeting card to stay put in my new altered book.

And this is how the book looks with the catbird card flipped down over the porthole. That brown washi tape peeking out from behind? It trims out the Jittery Girls assemblage that I created in Step III. It's horrid and has to go. The lurid royal blue on the garish card said so.

While I was tweaking the tape, I also redid the tie closure, substituting ribbon for the red baker's twine. The trick was to find ribbon that fit through the eyelets I had installed in the last round, but after digging a little I found some. The blue on the greeting card really changed my sense of color in this book.

Because I had a few more minutes, and wanted to clear my table, I incorporated additional scraps from the original bombed Barcelona book. Since I wanted to create a pocket, I used glue dots (sometimes called pop-up dots) from the craft store for attachment. I was playing off the line of text that's there at the bottom, which says "I floated in the quiet waters of a rock pool." Floating doll, floating text. Just the sort of detail that I like to be in control of.

Scissors for demonstration purposes only. I'm not sure what will wind up in the pocket, but something will show up on the table eventually.

To conclude today's work, I snapped a photo of the binding. Despite all my additions, there's still plenty of room and the binding remains in good shape, the pages begging to be turned.

'Til next time. Thanks for following along.
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Still hanging in with the story? You can find Part 5 here: http://lauratringaliholmes.blogspot.com/2013/04/dont-get-jittery-on-me-part-5-or-open_19.html