gluebook pages

I made a few more of these, two of which will go off to Sue in Australia, altho I haven't yet decided which two. We got one of each other's in Mary Green's swap and have begun an email friendship. So nice to meet compatible people now and then, but too bad she's sooo far away. Ah, well...

These gluebook pages are quite enjoyable to make. For the background papers, I use pages from old books, some sheet music, maps, ledger pages, pretty much any vintage paper. Then I choose a focal image and sift thru my boxes of paper ephemera looking for things that seem to go with it. After auditioning many things, it always sort of shakes itself out and then I begin playing with the layout of the items. This on top of that? That on top of this? Left? Right? Eventually one way looks better than the others and that's the one I go with. It all makes for a pleasant hour at my vintage paper table. (as opposed to my current day materials desk or my computer desk) Try them, they're fun.

Every single item on all of these is the actual old paper, image, label, whatever, except for the girl in the lacy dress on the Rieger's page. She's a copy. It used to kill me to use the original of something but once I got past the first couple times, I'm really liking it. The finished product seems richer to me.

These labels are all from vintage threads and buttons I've had for ages.
Just couldn't stand to use them, but once I did, I love this page.
Sorry, Sue - I'm keeping this one lol.

vintage gluebook pages swap

I signed up for Mary Green's vintage gluebook pages swap. Gluebooks may appear simple at first glance - no ink, no stamps, no embellishments, nothing but paper - but a good gluebook page has balanced composition, a cohesive color scheme, and a story to tell. The swap is for 6 pages, 5"x7" each, using actual vintage paper or copies of actual vintage paper. Since I'm working on 'using it', not storing it for posterity, I cut some 140lb watercolor paper to 5x7, got out my drawer of vintage papers - old ledger sheets, book pages, vintage dictionary pages, sheet music, labels from old crochet threads, postage stamps - and went to work.

Based on a previous class I'd taken of Mary's, I did my backgrounds first. A strip of text, a strip of map or floral paper, maybe some sheet music. Once those were dry and flat, I started going thru my old images of women mostly, but I found a little girl I liked and a class picture from a school and a trio of girls. I began playing with layouts and 'extras,' the little bits that round out the composition and add to the story. I ended up with the following 7 pages - 6 for the swap and one for Mary. I'll let her choose which one to keep.

I like a few of these well enough that I may make a second round so that I can keep a couple cause the problem with using real vintage paper is that once you use it, it's gone for good. You can get the same look with a copy of it, but you never get the same feel that you do with the real thing. Everything is offset slightly to the right because holes will be punched along the left margins so that they can be bound with rings and a cover from Mary that's included in the swap.

Which ones do you like best?

have glue stick, will create

There's an art form out there called 'gluebooks.' I'd never heard the term until I signed up for an online collage class at GreenPaper. She offers a gluebook class, so I went and looked at the flickr album of past classes. It appeared to be collage distilled to it's most pure form - paper and glue.

A quick search yielded a Yahoo group, so I signed up and when I got the first digest of messages, there was a list of current 'challenges.' One of the was the Blindfold Challenge, where you close your eyes, open a magazine at random and tear out three pages. You then proceed to make a gluebook page with inly the stuff on those 3 pages.

I figured for my first attempt, it might be wise to have some guidelines, so I grabbed an old Country Living (figured I could hardly go wrong with that LOL) and ripped out 3 pages. I should have taken pictures of them but roughly, they had an image of a fireplace with decorated mantle, the lead page of an article on persimmons, three men on a porch holding pumpkins, and some misc text.

The mantle image grabbed me right off, so I glued that to one side of a spread in the little journal I decided to use as my 'challenge' book. I kept looking at the pages, clipping out words and phrases and smaller images, then trying them out on my pages until I liked them. I glued it all down, then added a few more bits here and there.

Conclusion - I really enjoyed the constraint of having only those 3 pages to work from. I think it helped me to focus, instead of leafing thru endless magazines in search of more, more, more. So, the left page is the mantle with various words that give an idea of what the image means to me.

I've never actually had a black mantle but I quite like it. The black frames with B&W images work for me too.

The right side of the spread is much busier. The background is strips torn from the 3 pages. In the center is one of the guys holding a pumpkin, only he's upside down. The text strip on the far right was some sort of antacid, I think. It's upside down too, so you don't accidentally read 'acid reflux' when you're supposed to be enjoying the collage!

I liked the house and the chandelier. The words 'comfort zone' were perfect cause that's what my house is for me.

Anyway, it's my first gluebook effort and I'm pleased with it. It's pretty much free - old magazines, a glue stick and a journal or notebook from the dollar store. Plus, just sitting down and cutting and pasting is a blast. It's like 2nd grade when you didn't have a care in the world except whether you had good stuff in your lunch and if Walt Disney was on that night.

Anything that can make me feel like that in this day and age, you can bet I'll be going back to again and again!

Blindfold Challenge