I meet with a group of women every Wednesday morning to work on a new medium for all of us — altered books.

We pick up books from the county library’s bookstore that they give away for free, and cut and paint and rip and otherwise change them into other things. I’m working on two different things, to allow one to dry as I pick up the other, one of which is “desecrating” a Precious Moments board book.

I have to admit that I work on this with much glee, altering these little saccharine watercolor figures to my own purposes.

Here are the first three pages. I’m not yet sure where it’s going, and I’m sure I’ve been inspired by Lisa Snellings Clark’s fabulous poppets, and I’m loving it so far.

Page one of “Precious What?”, paper, acrylic paint, fabric, and glue

Page two of “Precious What?”, paper, acrylic paint, sari-remnant ribbon, and glue

Page three of “Precious What?”, acrylic paint, fabric, and glue. Still in progress on this one.

This morning was hilarious, because one of our members recently returned from a trip to visit family in Nebraska, where she was asked what she was working on recently and couldn’t quite bring herself to tell them, “Well, there’s this woman in my group working on desecrating a Precious Moments book, when she’s not ripping apart a math book with an Exacto knife. . .”

Am I getting too much pleasure out of this?

This entry was posted by Jess on Wednesday, January 23rd, 2008 at 7:23 pm and is filed under In Progress, Paper. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.