Altered Composition Books

Even though Christmas is still 6 months away in retrospect that is not that far off when you are like me and make a good number of your gifts. So I am always looking for fun little gifts that are functional as well as beautiful and thought I would share with everyone some of my gift ideas.

The first one I am sharein is hand altered composition books. You can get composition books really cheap at dollar stores and I dare say Walmart is $.98 and then with a bit of decorative papers and pretty little collage images you can come up with a breathtaking notebook perfect for that special some one.

Here are a few designs I have come up with for my Etsy shop.

SORCIERE NOTEBOOK

With this one I found an awesome image of the evil fairy from Sleeping beauty and great hand made paper in this black and green. I cut a mat to go behind the image and then I took pearl ex in gold and dusted it then sealed it with "Pastel" fixative. I added some great brads down the side and a lovely piece of tulle ribbon to tie it all together.

CELTIC JOURNEY NOTEBOOK

So for this one I created the images in photo shop by combining a background I made with digital stamps. I printed them out on my home computer added some great lime paper by K & Co, black and white ribbon along the edge and to make it a one of a kind I added metal flowers along her bow. to finish I used black paint to distress the edges.

BOMBSHELL NOTEBOOK

For this book I found a great film noir inspired backgroundand in photoshop I altered it by adding the Marylin Monroe pin up and sentiment frame. I found some great girly pink and black polk-a-dot paper for the background and on one of my antique outings found some amazing vintage polk-a-dot ribbon. to finish it off I added some amazing animal print bling by spare parts (you can get them at Hobby Lobby). This is perfect for the retro friends in your life!

SAMURI NOTEBOOK

I have a number of friends who are very into all things asian so I created these background papers in photoshop by layering them until I got the effect I wanted. For My background paper I used Bo Bunny swirl card stock and added some hand dyed silk ribbon along the edge and knotted it off to create the dangles. Then I took oriental coin brads from creative imaginations and ran then down the spine and tied one to the ribbon dangles along with a cool metal oriental finding I found in my stash.

JUST BREATH NOTEBOOK

this one was inspired by my best friends favorite movie "Everafter" and in photo shop I created a image by layering images I found on the internet and some of my digital Webster Pages papers. Then as a background I had this amazing Cosmo Cricket papers and then using gold acrylic paint and a dry paint brush I antiqued the book. I added some pretty rust colored ribbon from my stash and metal flowers along the bottom edge.

I do sell mine in my Etsy store but I also love to give these as gifts to friends and family.

This week the DYSU blog is having a hollywood challenge and I invite all of you to pop over and check it out and perhaps even enter your own designs.

If you make some of your own composition books I would love to see them so be sure and add a thread to this entry.

Oh and dont forget tonight on TLC CRAFT WARS begins!

Happy Crafting

Leanne