Yes, it's one of the two US postal bags that I got delivered to my doorstep (okay, it was my office's doorstep) in the past few months. In them were wonderful amazon.com orders and no they weren't so huge that they should have required their own bag. They were simply delivered that way, in a box inserted in a neatly closed postal bag. I already thought is was cool that this happened once, but twice was like a little miracle. Today I am going to show you what I did with a part of one of them, 'cause you know I couldn't just let a gift like that pass by unused. ;-)
As I have mentioned before I have slowly been altering an atlas over the past months to turn it into my new everyday journal. I took out about half of it's pages and then put gesso on the remaining ones. After that I put paint on every spread, sometimes gouache and sometimes watered down acrylic. Here's some examples of the spreads as they are now all ready for use.
After I did the inside it was time to think about the outside of the atlas. It had a fabric cover and I had put gesso on that as well, so I basically had a very boring white book. At first I wanted to do a very colorful collage on the cover, but then I remembered my postal bags and thought: why not make a cover out of a piece of them?
So I got to cutting and sewing. The material was quite easy to sew with my sewing machine. Because it was still a little bland I added some ribbon and that was that. It didn't really need any more than that. Here's how it looks now:
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| The front... |
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| The back.... |
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| The whole thing! |
I'm pretty excited about it and think it's a really unique cover, so a big thank you goes out to the US Postal Gods for sending me these treasures.
Meanwhile I have started using the atlas and I really like it's big sturdy pages. I have finished several spreads already, but will show some of those at a later time when I have some more. Here's the first spread as a little teaser ;-)
You can see it only a little in this picture, but I like how the original page still shines through. It gives some extra interest to the spread. (You can also see I like extra extra dark chocolate!).
For the coming time this atlas will be my steady companion as it records my daily life. I love it already!