Vintage Book DIY

Now that Christmas and New Year projects are finished, time to tackle some other things that have been on the to-do list.   I've seen painted books all over Pinterest and have had my eye on this stack from an end table:

I like using old books as decor, and love the designs on these, but not all the dark colors.  Time to lighten things up!

This is a pretty simple project - I just started painting the books with gesso until I got the coverage I wanted.   I wasn't going for total coverage, just enough to knock-back all the dark color.   A word of warning - not quite sure what is in the red pigment, but it took several coats of gesso, a couple of coats of black gesso and then more white, to banish the pink that kept bleeding through !  It probably would have worked better with non-water based mediums.

After the gesso dried , I sanded a bit to highlight some of the detaining.

I've  had a chipboard book in my stash for ages and decided to add it to the group.   Same treatment - a couple of coats of white gesso and some sanding to distress it.

Now on to adding some details.   I stamped a small flourish on the top of  books with black Stazon.   I tried stamping along the spine, but couldn't get a clear image as it was hard to make full contact.    Instead I glued on pieces of Tim Holtz tissue paper and knocked back the black with a light coat of gesso.

Loving my shabby -chic books.

Earth Works by Nancy R. Hugo - A Review

I love to read gardening books during the winter;  they remind me of gardens of summers past and give me hope for gardens of summers future.   I don't read how-to gardening books, but rather books about gardens written by gardeners about the good, the bad and the ugly experiences in their gardens. 

Old books about gardens are the best - another winter read was  Garden Open Today by Beverly Nichols ,  published in 1963.  How else would I know that in the 1960s  the Fire Department  (at least in charming old England) would come and hose out the gunk from your garden water feature?   Pretty sure even in England this charming service is no longer available.   Mr. Nichols thinks that every garden should have a "water feature"- maybe our back 40 swamp can be re-branded !

Back to  Earth Works by Nancy Hugo - what a delight!    The book is a month-by-month treasure of gardening insights, opinions, and just great writing.    She starts by recommending old gardening books, beginning with my favorite,  Onward and Upward in the Garden by Katherine White that I talked about here.

I like people with opinions and this book is full of them.  On hollyhocks: " Grow the single- flowered ones, not the doubles.  A double-flowered hollyhock is like a 7-foot man who's changed his hairstyle to attract attention".    For July :  "What most gardeners want in July are flowers that need no attention.  They want flowers they can smile at on the way to the air-conditioned car".  Her go-to flower for July is Echinacea, one of my all-time favorites. 

From our back garden - sans water feature!

It's not all snappy comments - I learned that toads don't drink water, they absorb it through their skin. And that the American lawn is the largest crop in the world, using more fertilizer than all of India and Africa do.  Any one who has seen our lawns knows we are most definitely NOT contributing to that scary stat!    I also got a recommendation for a plant for our problematic front slope,  Fire Pink,  that apparently isn't fussy about its growing conditions.   It does have the downside of being red  (I have opinions, and one of them is that most red flowers are hideous), but since I can't really see the slope from the house, I may give them a whirl.

I'm going to go though Ms Hugo's list of "must-reads', looking for her  sure-sign of a great one - a dried pressed flower between the pages.

Envelope Bookmarks

  I don't have many real bookmarks,  except this priceless one DC son made for me years ago:

I have no problem tearing pages out of old books to use in art projects.  I think of it as giving new life to the pages, making something beautiful,  and it beats ending up in the dumpster.   But folding down the page as a bookmark ?  For all that is right and holy - NO!  This just makes me crazy - books  with creased corners are just not right.

When I start a new book the first thing I do is make sure I have something to use as a bookmark - the one above,  or something in one of my art magazines that catches my fancy, or a piece of ribbon .  It would N.E.V.E.R. occur to me to do this:

  

Bookmarks made from envelopes are all over Pinterest .   They are so easy to make.  You  just cut off the corners of the envelope ( the corners opposite the flap) and end up with  little diagonal pockets that fit over the corner of the book page to mark  your spot.  Pretty clever.  Of course, you could cut out a template and make these from scrapbook paper, but that's lots more work.  I'm all about the easy way.

Then the fun begins.  There are all kinds of ways to decorate these.    You could glue on some scrapbook paper,  color the corner,  add stickers - you get the idea, or go to Pinterest for a bazillion more.    I stamped and embossed these:

I love the look of white stamping on craft paper.   I stamped these with Versamark and then embossed with white embossing powder.  Isn't this Spice Market stamp from Hero Arts is just gorgeous?  Thank you for showcasing this stamp, Diana Trout.

I covered these with Washi tape.  I found that using a wider piece of tape in the very corner ensures that the back of the bookmark will also get full coverage.  The two ends of the tape fill it in nicely.

Montana Granddaughter is 7 and reading chapter books, so these are heading out to her.

So cute!

Now I have a stash of bookmarks near my books .  Warning : making these is addictive.  Envelopes are no longer safe!

Book Review - Plant This! by Ketzel Levine

I love books about gardening and when I came across this at our favorite  book store, The Book and Bar in Portsmouth, NH, I knew it needed a home next to all my other gardening books.

What sold me is the hysterical sidebar for each plant.  One of my garden stores uses Latin names only- not in a snooty way, just in that way that experts in their field talk their secret lingo.  My high school Latin is not always up to the task so  I can fumble with the pronunciation.  Enter the "sounds like section" in the side bar, right under the botanical name.   So  Polygonatum odoratum  sounds like "a pig done ate 'em".   When was the last time you read a gardening book that made you laugh? ( I have some that have me sleeping by page 4).

There are beautiful illustrations by Rene Eisenbart- really more artsy than for plant identification .

Ms Levine is an NPR senior corespondent who took her first job outside radio at the National Arboretum for $7.00/ hr, in what she describes as a "lateral move from public broadcasting".   She writes like someone who loves her subject and has strong opinions about what she likes and dislikes - my kind of gal.

This is a book about her 100 favorite plants, grouped by season.  She clearly likes foliage plants  and shrubs , but I found myself wishing for more flowering plant recommendations.   Lucky her - she gardens in the moderate Pacific Northwest, so many of her selections wouldn't do well here in fierce New England winters.   I wish she had included a zone recommendation in the sidebar, but that's being nit-picky.

I got a great tip to try for containing gooseneck loosestrife (oops, I mean Lysimachia clethroides).  I love this plant, but is it , to put it mildly, an aggressive spreader.  I'm going to transplant some into my new garden space, confined in a buried one gallon pot.

This is just a fun read, not an encyclopedic all-there-is-to-know gardening book. You read it for lines like this: " I am nuts about plants with perfoliate leaves.  Yes, I am a cheap date".  Then she goes on to explain just what perfoliate leaves are - good to know for dazzling my Latin-speaking garden store clerks.   And here's another,  " If Lychins were a woman, she's be the type Seinfeld would date for her figure;  then once she opened her mouth,  he'd run screaming from the room".

And she gives us this great quote from JC Raulston, "You're not stretching yourself as a gardener if you're not killing plants".

Summer Memory Book

 I've blogged about our far-flung family and how we try to stay connected.  My favorite idea is the family compound, but since that's not likely to happen, we try other ways to stay connected.  Google chat ( in our experience much better than Skype),  shared photo-streams, lots of calls, emails and packages mean we  get to share in their every day lives.

 I've been making memory books for our Montana granddaughter for several years and usually much sooner than this!   She visits us every summer and I want her to remember all those fun times.  This year I found these cute book covers at Pick Your Plum.  The covers are made of very thin wood with a name cut-out at the bottom - so sweet!

I forgot to take a "before" picture, but here is one from PYP:

I colored the covers with several shades of blue Distress Inks and paints.  I just happen to have a set of alphabet stamps that fit the letter cut-outs and like how the stamped letters make the letters easier for to read.   (Names with lots of letters are a bit harder to read than the ones with just a few).

I used plain white paper for the pages and let Washi tape do double duty - securing the pictures and adding some fun color.

Some stamped circles toned down all that  white space.

I like making flags with wash tape for some outside the page interest.

 Not surprising, this is my favorite picture.  Siobhan loves to spend time in my studio investigating all my stuff and making art.  This was her first experience with embossing .  Don't you just love how she's concentrating on the process?   She was pretty impressed with how embossing works - another convert is born!

 Heading out to Montana to deliver this book in person.

How to Turn a Book into an iPad Cover



I've been wanting a new cover for my iPad .  The one  I have is fine - black pleather that is functional but not very exciting.  Boston Daughter has a cover like this for her Kindle  Fire - it looks like an old book. (Being her mother's daughter, she scrubbed it up a bit to tone down the gold and ramp up the vintage).  I decided to find an old book and make my own cover.

It took some time to find a book that would work.  First problem was size - the iPad is not a common book size, plus I didn't want one with too many pages as the iPad is pretty thin.  Then came the aesthetics - I needed a hard cover book with an interesting cover.  That leaves out most new books that have great paper covers, but the actual book covers are just plain.

 

I found just the thing at a great used book store in Maine.  This is not your usual musty-dusty place - the proprietor told me every page of every book is wiped down with a special solution before it goes on the shelf .  There were old - really old books here,  books fro collectors with prices for collectors.

 

 

 

 Boston Daughter in the stacks.  She's standing in front of several thousand dollars worth of very old books.

 

 

I found this beauty for $20.00   Size - perfect.  Cover art- perfect - score!

 

 WARNING !!  If you're the kind of person who thinks it's sacrilegious to cut up books, you should probably stop reading here because the next picture will send you into a tailspin.

 

 

Started by carefully cutting out the book pages by cutting  along the spine - being careful not to cut through it.  See?  Nothing bad happened - no fire, no smoting, just the book guts separated from the covers.

 

 

I cut a piece of cardboard the size of the back cover and glued some mulberry paper over it.  Then glued down some black elastic to hold the iPad in place.  Then I added a small loop of elastic that will become part of the closure and glued the whole  thing onto the inside back cover.  I used E6000 to glue this down - any really strong glue should work.  This is what holds the iPad in the book, so no wimpy glue for this step.

 

 

 The Captain drilled a small hole in the front cover for the button closure.  This fuzzy picture is a side view - I threaded some embroidery floss through the button holes, then tied a knot under the button to lift it off the cover a bit, pulled the threads through the drilled hole and glued them down to the inside of the front cover.

 

The inside of the front cover was blank, so I had already glued down a small opened file folder to add  interest.

 

 

I glued a decorated envelope over the file folder and threads .  This covers and secures the button threads and gives me a spot to stash papers.

 

 

This shows how the elastic cord holds the tablet in place.

 

 

 

 

Love my new cover!

 

Bookstore Cafe Love

 



A new year and a new favorite bookstore cafe- life is good! We celebrated   New Year at  The Book & Bar in Portsmouth.   It's our kind of spot - lots of good books in a beautiful space , plus a cafe with good noshes and drinks. 

The owners' plan was for a European- style literary salon, with good books and fine wine.  There is an eclectic selection of books, with an emphasis on art and literature.  Mixed in are some great children's books, cookbooks - the same categories found in any bookstore, but with books most don't carry.

 

Beautiful setting - high ceilings, big windows, vintage-style light fixtures.

 

 

 



 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Coffee art

 

Turns out the owners previously owned another of our favorite bookstore cafes - The Montague Bookmill.  The LA Times rated the Montague Bookmill as "perhaps the world's finest bookstore cafe".  The Bookmill's slogan (see t-shirt below) , "Books you don't need in a place you can't find" is right on - it's in a "you can't get there from here" location!  But once you find it, you'll fall in love - old mill on a river with some of the industrial gizmos as part of the decor,  lots of little reading nooks overlooking the river and a great cafe space.  And books- mostly used, mostly the kind you don't find in big box stores.



 

 

 

We'll be cheating on Barnes and Noble with our new bookstore cafe love.