Happy Easter!

Happy Easter everyone! I thought today I would post an altered board book. If you've never made one- they are quick, easy and have a really professional appearance when completed.
In addition to your regular scrapping supplies you will need a children's board book (yard sales and dollar stores are a great place to find these) acrylic paint that matches your selected patterned paper and gesso(found where art supplies are carried.) Then you will need a plan. Before I began this book I counted the number of pages and then on plain piece of paper made a rough sketch of what I wanted to put on each page. I began altering the book with the cover.

First, I sanded the front cover with a rough sandpaper just enough to make the surface porous enough to hold paint. Then I painted the cover with Gesso. If you aren't familiar with Gesso, it's a thick white paint usually used for covering and priming canvas. Once the Gesso was dried I painted the front cover with acrylic paint in a spring green. While waiting for that to dry I worked on covering my chipboard letters with paper and created the bunny paper piecing. Once I was sure the paint was completely dry I assembled the front cover, including a piece of green gingham paper over the spine. I used ZipDry Paper Glue to adhere everything in this project.

I wanted my book to have a closure so I glued a piece of twill across the front over the spine and down the back of the book, leaving long pieces on both ends so that there was enough to use to make a bow. I was worried about the ends of the twill unraveling- so along the raw ends I used a product called Freycheck (sold where sewing notions are found). This products seals raw edges of fabric and ribbon. To add depth and to give my book a sense of history I used Tim Holtz Tea Stain Distress ink and rubbed it all over the pages. A piece of an old t-shirt was used to apply it. Think about where the wear and tear would occur on the page and to make these areas darkest.

For the rest of the pages of the book I covered the pages with patterned paper, except for the center of the book where I repeated the Gesso and acrylic paint process. If your board book has slick, glossy pages then you will need to do a quick sanding on all pages, even if covering with patterned paper! All the words in the book were printed out on my computer and I added a little doodled border to most with a black marker. Ribbons were all attached by folding the ribbon in half and then stapling them to the word strips and then gluing them to the book as a whole unit. The most time consuming part of making this board book was the preplanning. I searched for a long time for all the paper piecing patterns.

Some were found in Scrapbooks, Etc, some on the internet, some on the Creating Keepsakes website. The final steps for completing the book was to sand along the edge of the pages to make sure that there wasn't any lose paper hanging over the size of the original book. For this process I used a large emory board. Altering this book was one of my favorite projects, ever! My plan is to add Easter pictures to it from various Easters and to store it along with my Easter Decorations to be displayed year after year. I think it will be a darling on my coffee table. I hope my boys will get a kick out of seeing how they've changed over the years. I know I will!