Altered Art Antics Weblog

Boy! I’ve been crazy busy the past few days! I’ve been taking the kids Geocaching every day, Wed – Friday. I let them each make their own cache to hide also. Saturday we had to go back out to their caches and redo the coordinates because it seemed that they were off by about 50 ft. Yikes! While we were out I picked up three sticks that I could turn into walking sticks for the three of us to go Geocaching with. I’ve started sanding them down and I have a woodburner to make some designs on them, then I’ll just need to drill a hole and get some leather straps to loop through. I need to go to Lowe’s today and get some sandpaper refills for our sander. My husband got up early yesterday (Saturday) and took our son fishing at a local lake with one of our friends, where they caught a lot of catfish! They had a great time and barely got home in time to go to the Family Fun event that they have every Saturday at the Museum of Art! You can sign up for a Saturday workshop that they have at the Art Museum and you and the kids can make a craft to keep, and the best thing is, it is all for free! Yesterday’s project was a nature journal. It was quite a bit more complicated than I expected, considering that kids are involved, but we still came out with cool projects. Actually, doing this nature journal gave me some great ideas for making my own journal/art books. Here’s a couple pictures of our journals that we made. It shows the back of my husband’s and the inside of mine.

They had some cool ideas for features of the books. The books were made out of cardboard with wallpaper scraps glued to the outside and inside covers, then fabric scraps were glued to the cover to make the spine. You then sew the sets of pages with buttons on the outside to hold them in. They gave us a pocket protector to fasten into the back cover to hold pencils and a paper cd sleeve with the clear plastic circle to paste into the back pages to hold leaves and other little nature items you might pick up. Sewing the pages into the book was too challenging to let the kids try and do it themselves, so my husband and I had to do our own plus theirs. Got to go get ready for church, will add some altered book technique tips later today.