I came up with an idea for my Good Housekeeping cookbook that I was dying to turn into something magical. Alter it! But I didn't want to alter it alone, and since this is a pretty common cookbook and I know lots of us have one, I figured we could do a collaboration of altered Good Housekeeping cookbooks!
This is the book I'm talking about. Now, I know that BH&G has a similar one and so does Betty Crocker and you can definitely use those or whatever other cookbook you have and want to play along with! That's why I made the hashtag kinda vague - in case you didn't have this exact book but wanted to join the rest of us altered cookbook peeps!
The Ripping
This is a folio that I took from the middle of one of the signatures of the book. The book has a bunch of signatures (no, I didn't count how many exactly) and you want to remove some of these folios from the center of each signature in order to free up space in the book so we can fluff it up with fun art stuff.
When you are done yanking folios, you'll want the signatures along the spine to look like this. I ended up pulling out 4 folios from each signature. I started with 3 but realized that it didn't give a whole lot of space for fluff but once I pulled out that 4th one, it gave me a decent amount of space.
Now, a lot of books are pretty easy in identifying the middle of the signature. Sometimes, these older better built books can be a bit of a trick and this book was one of those books.
The center of the signature once I pulled some pages.
Below you can see the image pages - they aren't sewn in, they are glued so I yanked them out.
Sometimes, a little bit of paper will be stuck in the book after you tear out the folios - and that's ok. This is for fun, not for perfection!
The Gluing
I started by gluing 2 pages together (using a gluestick - use whatever you want. I go into detail about glue in my process video below). And I'm sure 2 pages probably would have been ok, but I wanted a really thick, hard page so I ended up gluing a third page to it...so every 3 pages are glued together to create one page.
Yes, you will go through a lot of glue so be ready! And it may seem daunting to do all that gluing but you'll get into a flow and it becomes almost therapeutic...trust me, you'll find it relaxing after a few pages.
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I created a YouTube video on this beginning process:
If you're interested in playing along, let me know! Also, let me know some ideas you might have for pages we can make! I was thinking of using my prompt cards and pulling 5-6 and creating a page using them so each of us can interpret it in our own way...? Input definitely welcome!
And there's no limit on what you can use - I want it to be friendly to every artist so you don't feel like you have to buy stuff...use your markers, paints, watercolors, scrapbook papers, magazine images, etc!
Can't wait to start!
~M
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