Book Page Canvases and Sole Hope
Book Page Canvases and Sole Hope

Book Page Canvases and Sole Hope

I posted a while back about being excited to get started on my kitchen wall art and showed a little preview of some of the supplies I got:

After pondering how I wanted to give “texture” to the background of my canvases, I ended up deciding to cover them with book pages! Sorry Uncle Tom’s Cabin, you had to die for the greater good 🙂

I took the book apart by first removing the covers and as much of the binding as I could {it was already falling apart anyways.} I then took the pages out either one at a time or in small chunks… it actually went surprisingly fast. The most tedious part is making sure there’s no glue left on the edges.

To “glue” the pages down I used my homemade “Mod Podge” {1 part Elmer’s glue + 1 part water} – I’m sure the real stuff would work just the same. I found it easiest to start with the corners and work my way from one side of the canvas to the other. Here is an example of two types of corners I used:

As you can see the pages are different angles and overlap each other.

For the other type of corner, I put the page on a diagonal, let a good portion hang off the edge, and cut it at the corner. I then wrapped one side down and secured the back with tape. {I used masking tape for all edged that wrapped around the canvas}

I then folded the extra triangular “tab”down and wrapped the other side around the canvas.

From there I just worked from left to right making sure to keep the angles of the papers different. As I laid down each page, I smoothed out any wrinkles as best as possible. I should also note that unless the page wrapped around to the back, I cut the titles of the top {somehow titles like “Tom’s New Master” didn’t seem appropriate to be catching people’s eyes.}

After I had all the surfaced covered in book pages, I then coated the whole thing in a layer of the glue mix, smoothing out any bubbles with my fingers. You’ll notice it looks super wrinkly when wet, but it actually dried pretty darn smooth! I repeated this process 6 times… I’d say each one took around an hour.

While these babies were drying, I worked on my sketches for the layouts. The canvases are 16″x20″ so I used that scale on grid paper. {Thanks to all you lovelies who helped me decide on coffee as my theme!}

I debated adding “saucers” under the cups, but I just didn’t like how the looked. After I had each of my coffees drawn, I cut them out and arranged them in the order they’ll be on the wall {this will also help with my color selection later for each cup}

I debated whether or not to show this, but I didn’t start with the grid paper first thing… I had to scratch it out on paper first so I could decide what I wanted, and then I moved to the actual scaled drawings… o the creative process 🙂

I still couldn’t decide if I wanted coloured cups or not so I did a quick “sample” and concluded that colour is the way to go!

My original thought for the lettering was that I would choose my font and then copy the words by hand while looking at my computer. The font I decided on however is a little more complex than I had originally pictured…. so long story short I printed the letters out in the appropriate size on cardstock and I am currently in the process of cutting them out. {They’ll go on before I do the coffee.}

Which brings me to my next topic. A while back one of my bloggy buddies Natalie @ Take the Cannoli posted on an organization called Sole Hope {you can read her post here.} Sole Hope is an organization that works to provide shoes to children in impoverished nations.

{Sole Hope gallery}
In order to help this organization Natalie and a few other awesome ladies are organizing a raffle that will be held at Rags to Stitches in order to raise money for the materials for these shoes. In her post Natalie asked if people would be willing to donate products from their homemade shops for this raffle, or even just purchase a raffle ticket for $1. I don’t have a shop, so I figured I could contribute to the raffle when the time came… until Natalie sent out an email to all the ladies in our group asking for donations to the raffle. Since I had been having some success with my current project and really wanted to help out, I asked Natalie if I could contribute some art work. After she filled me in on the details, I took a break on my project for a couple days to work on this:

{Hopefully it helps!} To see the rest of this project as well as many of the other totally awesome items being donated, be sure to check out the raffle coming up and purchase a ticket… it’s just $1 and it’s for such a great cause!

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