Friday, January 07, 2011



Today's art is one of my favorites... BOOKS! This one is jam packed with blank drawing paper to be journaled or doodled in. I began with corrugated cardboard and exposed some of the "waffle". It was painted with two different colors of Lumiere paint. I rubber stamped embossed the shell design on some purple velvet and stitched it to some water colored paper that had been salt treated to give it spots. I beaded the shells (what I've dubbed 'dragons tooth') and beads to the top left corner then lined the inside cover with some awesome purple and green batik. I then bound the pages and cover with purple braiding cord that I knotted and decorated with another dragons tooth and beads at the ends. I've made dozens of these books and each new one becomes my favorite. :-)
To heat embossed velvet simply select a simple deeply etched rubber stamp. Place your velvet nap side down on the rubber stamp (note you can NOT use gel stamps with these). Spritz back side of velvet with water and place your iron (set slightly below the cotton setting) on the stamp being sure that there you use the flat side WITH-OUT holes over the stamp. Hold iron in one place for a short while and remove, allow stamp to cool slightly before removing the velvet. Obvious these can not be laundered or reironed.

2 comments:

Charmion said...

I'm definitely going to give this a try! Thanks, Nj.

NEEDLEWINGS said...

Beautiful! I saw the embossing done on the Karen Duvall show one time, but have never tried it. Love the way you did your book cover. Turned out wonderful!
Keep your creative juices flowing!