Defacing books: Is Outrage!

Today has been great--the weather finally broke and temps today were in the 60s (finally!), I had lunch with a good friend, got my rear end kicked by my Pilates trainer, and things with the boys went pretty well today. Oh, and I made a ton of cards. I'll show those another day, but I wanted to show a few that I made yesterday. I saw this card from my fellow Philly Inker, Ilina Crouse, a few weeks ago and saved it as a Good Idea, and then decided earlier this week to tweak it for myself. I don't have the Newsprint dsp, so I decided to improvise. Anyone who has been to our house knows we have a LOT of books. (60 boxes worth, the last time we moved). It is inevitable in a dual-academic family that this would happen. Anyway, we have old books, new books, books saved for children when they get older, books for rereading again and again, books for dipping into only occasionally, you get the idea.

So, I thought, well, we have all these books, surely some old book must have an appendix or something that I could tear out and use for a border. So I started stalking our shelves, looking for something with dense text, old typeset, and the right width. I found the first two easily enough, but the last was difficult. So I improvised. At the back of my (very old) edition of Dr. Zhivago is an appendix with Zhivago's poems. I confess, though I'm a Russian/Soviet historian, I've never been able to get into that book. I loved both movie versions, but the book is pretty obtuse. Pasternak might have been a brilliant poet, but his prose is quite dense.

I took a deep breath, asked forgiveness of the book gods, and tore a few pages out of the appendix. I cut them up into strips and assembled them into a longer collage strip that I used on the bottom of my card. I dirtied the whole business up with some basic black ink and that was it! I really love this card, but I think I'll wait for the Newsprint dsp to attempt a series!

I liked the layout so well, I tried a different color scheme and came up with these cards as well! (As a kind of funny aside, I was watching Archangel while making these. It's a thriller starring Daniel Craig and is set in modern Russia).