Abracadabra

I had mentioned that I found the surface of my desk again, so Thanksgiving weekend was spent finally rediscovering my passion of art!

I was bombing around Pinterest the other day and found a Halloween craft that I just HAD TO TRY! They are altered Halloween books and the fo-leather technique she used was one that I haven't done in years, and frankly, forgot all about! She provides great instructions as to how she assembled her book if you want to go check out her beauties!

Side bar: Last Halloween at Micheals, I saw that they were selling a chochkie ornament/book thing for around $30...very similar to what I made ...though mine was mostly free!)

Here is my take on "Spells and Potions: Conversation Halloween Altered Books"... :)

A few years ago, I got my hands on a huge stack of old, hard covered Readers Digests, that have just been aching to be altered! I used two of them this weekend...

Step one: I painted a coat of modge podge on the spine, front and back cover, and loosely laid a piece of paper towel over top, using my fingers to create different size creases and wrinkles. Keep it nice and bumpy, as that's what makes the fo-leather look. 

(I did mine a bit different from"Better After" as she dampened the paper towel first, laid it in place and then modge podged. I think that both methods work just fine, though hers possibly would create a few more creases and wrinkles because you could manipulate it a bit more...).

287/365 plus plus plus ;)

Step Two: Let the paper towel dry and then paint over all the covers with black paint.

Step Three: (I forgot to snap the picture...) I took a bottle of gold paint and a sponge brush and, with a very light hand, brushed the gold over the raised textured cover. I went a bit heavy in a few places, but was able to fix it by just repainting the area with black and then reapplying the gold.

Step Four: Always my favourite part: accessorize!! 

I painted some chipboard letters gold, and inked the edges a bit to roughen them up and give them some dimension.

For my Spells Altered book: I picked the spiders up at the Dollaramma. I just painted the nasty red eyes gold and dusted them a bit with the gold to make them match the cover. With the brads, I pulled off the back spikes to make them flush and pounded some texture into them.

I used my glue gun (like the example used) to create the spiderweb in the corner of the Spells book and then just black/gold painted over the glue. 

For my Potion book: Last year at the dollar store I had picked up a fugly plastic rat that I knew I wanted to use. (This was what the one at Michaels had...a rat crawling up the book...LOVED IT!) 


So I pulled out my crafting hot knife, and sliced my wee ratty in half, so that he was flush on the backside.


The skulls were from a horrible Dollaramma necklace that I dismantled, and painted black.

My display is now all set up and ready to frighten, along with my potion jars that I made a couple years ago!

Cheers!