Friday 6 March 2015

Birthday Celebrations at AVJ - Anything Tim

Today sees us celebrating our first birthday or anniversary at A Vintage Journey and we are celebrating in style. There are prizes galore, changes to our schedule and a new Creative Guide joining us - what more could we want? Well of course we would love you to join us too.

For my CG sample I have made a Correspondence book using Tim's new papers. Now you may well have seen the book I posted on Sunday for CVC, that was made from the off-cuts of this one and yesterdays journal pages uses up the last scraps.
This is a hard bound, hard spined book which will be one of the types I am teaching at my next workshop on the 30th March (details in my sidebar).


I'll show you some of the steps to preparing the boards.

Cut boards from mountboard and cover with tissue wrap. Put under heavy weighted books/box for a few hours or overnight to dry and flatten.


Daub with picket fence distress paint – heat dry.
Dab and spritz fired brick distress stain and spray a little gathered twigs distress spray stain, spritz with water and push the two boards together to distribute the colours on both. Heat dry.
Repeat with faded jeans distress spray stain and heat dry. The dampening and heat drying causes the boards to buckle a bit so put them back under heavy weights to flatten again.


Use picket fence distress stain and some white linen dylusions spray to mist over the colours and tone them down and blend them together more.


Sew pages together.
Adhere front and back end papers. Tear the front edges of the papers and ink them all round.


Put cover boards together with a spine and tape (I often use DIY gaffa type tapes.) 
On this occasion I used brown packing tape.


Glue pages in.


Cover the spine with tissue tapes and note a small piece of elastic added to the top of the spine.


I added a book plate tied to the arrow with rusty wire ........


..... a stamped postbox using the Classics #13 set ......


........ bits of idea-ology findings and ephemera .......


......... charms hanging down the spine. 
All the metal pieces were daubed with some antique linen distress paint and treasure copper rubbed over them.


Do you know - I might just make this into a Birthday book so I can keep a reminder of when I need to send cards out each month. Mmmmm birthday, correspondence, celebrations, wow what a day.

Because we are going monthly on our AVJ challenges there will be a monthly £20 voucher donated by our fabulous sponsors Country View Crafts and for today there are some very special birthday prizes to win as well. So please accept this invite to the party, we would love to see you there.

Have a wonderful weekend and here's a quote for you.

Don't just count your years, make your years count.
George Meredith

hugs Brenda xxx