Vintage printers tray with curiosities ...

Did my husband want a vintage printers tray filled with curiosities for his birthday ? I have no idea, But yesterday he got one that I had made him. Here it is :

I got the tray from Artist Trading Post, (I don't believe that they are on the website because of the carriage .. but if your willing to pay a carriage charge then I'm sure Jamie would post one out to you .. give him a ring :o) )
I filled it with all sorts of paraphenalia, war medal, 2nd WW bullet casings (rich is into war history) there are some metal detector finds old coins etc, there are old bottles some with their original contents still in them, there are some very old glasses in a little leather case, all kinds of things that we managed to find :) .. and there are still plenty of spaces to add more things too.
I papered the backgrounds, each individual piece was cut out then inked with walnut distress ink, all the items (if more valuable & might want to get them out again are stuck in with glue dots, and the no value stuff is adhered with Glossy accents.

Then just before Rich's birthday we had been away in Spain for 12 days ... I took an art journal with me to play in, I tried to do the backgrounds before we went & took just one small folder of images, 1 gluestick & my art journalling pens to finish off the pages.
Here are some of them so far ...

Altered Book workshop

Finally I've made it back to my computer to update my blog, this is what happens when the kids all break up from school & I feel that perhaps I really ought to do 'those' jobs that I avoid most of the time, we spent 4 hours yesterday, washing, drying & Ironing the backlog of clothes, & at the same time getting the boys to try on everything in their wardrobe, Sas did hers at the same time & we now have a good 4 bags of clothes for charity ... another good job done !
So back to the business in hand, I ran an altered book workshop on Tuesday, with 10 lovely ladies attending we had a full house & a very messy table ( for those of you who read my blog you'll know I find the messy table bit hard lol)

We did hand print opening pages, we made windows, opening doors, pockets & Niches & several different ways of folding the pages to add interest. We tried gesso'ing the pages out & leaving the type showing.

We got VERY messy but had fun playing with Colour washes from Ranger, Spray Inks from Dyan at Art from the heart, Distress Inks, Claudine Hellmuth studio line paints, Dabbers and piles of collaging materials.
The ladies were alot of fun, we had some of a younger generation along to play too, (thanks for coming Jo, Amy & Alex) :o)
BEtween them all they created some beautiful pages, I was suitably impressed with all of them & their first attempts at altering a book, (apart from Sue who has already altered a book :o) ... Even Bernice who wasn't at all sure about ripping pages out of the book before we started got into the swing of things & even started a second book when she got home, Blimey !

So from left to right we have Bernice, Jayne, Amy, Trish & Jo.

and from right to left we have June, Jenny, Alex, Halina and Sue

And here is my lovely daughter Saskia making tea & coffee for everyone ! She came along to help out for the day :D

Here's Jo with one of her pocket pages

This is the very talented Trish with her window pages ,,
Here is Amy (Trish's daughter) with her handprint pages
Here is Jayne with one of her lovely backgrounds ..

Here's our resident workshopee Bernice ...

And June with her gorgeous Opening doors page

Halina on the left & Alix on the right with their fabby pages,

Jenny with her lovely page ,,,

And last but certainly not least is Sue (sue is my most brilliant Mum xx)