Book Arts: Altered books

I thought at first that book arts was going to involve more of making art out of books, altered books, such as the next two projects I made. But I really do enjoy altered books and should try some more. I have a few ideas brewing in my head for later. But for this first project, our theme was to be taken from the book itself. I went perusing goodwill and other places looking at books and finding books that eventually spoke to me and went together. I came up with this concept I call "Our Love Story." The text comes from chapter headings from the books and the titles are part of the text of the project.

I pondered and discussed and sketched and worked and reworked these books until I figured out how to get the project to come together just as I imagined it. I learned how to glue pages together and I learned to be ok with taking out chunks of a book. My amazing husband figured out how to get the heart cut out of the final book with his scroll saw (that would have taken an amazing amount of time, talent and patience to cut by hand!) 

The books have been glued together so that they are flush with the tops of each other...Marci says that people pay the most attention to the top and side of a book, and not so much to the bottom, so that helped me make that decision.  I used stained tyvek to reinforce the old bindings of these books.  The troubles I had were in letting the final book lay flat and in being able to always read the spine of the book that is showing with each cover turned. My final solution was to find a title (the blue book) that went with the love story and could be used as a lift to help in the display of the book. Another Marci-ism is that each part of a project must be a part of the project. You should never have to tell someone to ignore part of a book. Everything should go together. 

(By the way, the picture of the older couple is part of the book. The younger couple is Kyle and I on our 10th anniversary.)