It's been a while since I created this book, but I've never posted all of the pages. My brother and his wife love lighthouses and love to visit them. Because I lived on a sailboat (at that time), I was always trying to downsize my stuff. Every year I would look at this unbelievably awesome book about the lighthouses of the Pacific Ocean and I just couldn't part with it. I bought it originally to learn more about the areas where I went scuba diving. When diving a light house, it is always fun to learn the history. Then I started altering books and I knew this was exactly what I wanted to do with this book.
Because this book is about lighthouses, I didn't want to cover all the pages, so you will see whole chapters that I left available for reading and reference. However, I did alter some of those pages too. You'll see.
Starting with the first page.
The inside covers had a great map of where the lighthouses featured in this book, were located. I added two fun little tags to leave the entire map open.
I didn't want to totally cover the title page either, so using velum, I printed a picture of my brother and sister in law standing in front of a lighthouse. The left page is a string embossed lighthouse, a technique I love to use to add subtle images.
I appliqued printed material by stuffing it with yarn (it's what I had on hand) and covering the edges with a smaller version of white nautical rope.
Some pages are just that, pages. Nothing special, no great technique, etc. This is one of those. I used stickers with a seashore theme and glued broken, smooth, seashells around them. The sea shells are ones I collected from a beach on an island in the Sea of Cortez, Mexico, for this book.
The book came with a protective paper cover that was in very bad shape. I cut it up to add here, including the description from the inside of the jacket (paper cover). It was very long so I cut each paragraph and linked them together in this pocket using ribbon.
The story of the right page is about a storm, so I made a sheet of very lumpy paper and marbled in the darker blues of an ocean storm.
The story on the left references a specific lighthouse (highlighted script) that we passed in our sailboat on our way to Mexico, so I used a cut from the actual chart that we used to chart our course during out travels. It's hard to explain, but the charts from our journey are very special memories because of the notes we made, the way it shows our progress, etc. My brother and his wife, also avid boaters, understand this so I added our chart as a personal touch.
One way to alter part of the chapters I left open for reading. I used chalk to highlight the story and added the title around the edge.
In each of my books, I create a dedication page to say why I chose that book and why I gave it to them. This is the dedication page for my brother and sister in law, and the picture is one our father took of a local lighthouse at night.
I have 5 favorite pages in this book and this is one of them. It's a story page about a shipwreck on the Oregon Coast that we visited every year. We watched it sink farther and farther into the sand. The pictures are from historical records and ones our father took throughout our childhood, again making the page personal.
Each one of the torn ocean papers is glued to the torn book page and opens. So this is actually four pages with more of the same inside.
On the left page, at the base of the lighthouse, I used dried weeds that look like seaweed. It is important when using plants to seal them entirely onto the page using a gel medium or similar paste.
This page actually tells a story. The clip art graphics show what happened in the story, and the numbers correspond to the numbers in the actual story. This page did not turn out as I intended, and I still don't like it.
This page has it's own special story for my brother and his wife, so I left the left page open, and gave my sister in law the velum, to tell her own story of this lighthouse. (She's also a scrapper).
The next several pictures are just ways to add a little fun in the chapters that I left open so they could read them.
Now we are back to just fun, decorative pages.
The lantern and firewood (above), cannon, gloves, etc. (below) are all items mentioned in the stories unfolding on these pages.
This was my first page for this book and by the time I finished making the sunken ship, I knew I was going to be hooked on altered books. Again, I used weeds from the Oregon area to simulate seaweed.
Even though the Eddystone Light is not part of the lighthouses in this book, it is by far, the most famous lighthouse in history. The left page is the words to the song, "Eddystone Light" and the right pages record the history of the 5 lighthouses that stood on this sight.
Oops! I have since painted the inside of the door. I drew the stairs and brickwork as described in one of the stories in this book.
The CD is the entire Eddystone Light story (a very fat book).
Inside the back cover... a different section of map from the front cover.
