Chunky Bird Book and Some ATCs

Having to complete those Pick-A-Theme ATCs last week reminded me that it had been a while since I really created anything and that I feel a lot better when I'm spending the day creating rather than just wasting it. Plus, I again have waited until the last minute and need to crank out some work before the mailing deadline passed. :)

The project this time was a 'Funky Birds' chunky book. Chunky books are 4 inch by 4 inch works of art that have some form of dangly embellishment hanging from either the right or bottom edges. Once you get a collection of individal pages you put them together to form a book and the cumulative danglies result in the chunky effect. The very first one I took part in was a 15 page bird trade and I've been hooked ever since. They are quite pricey to mail, since I live in Australia and most of the hosts are in America, so I don't get to play quite as often as I'd like. I have still managed to accumulate books for birds, mermaids, monkeys, africa, and love.

So the page above was my first sample design. I like to try to incorporate my danglies into the page design, rather than just have the attached to a corner. I was pretty happy with how it turned out, so didn't change too much for the final design, which you can see below. For this swap we only had to trade 5 pages. I'll send an extra one for the host and be left with 2 for personal trades in the future.

I also managed to create some ATCs. These were done using the Bernie Berlin technique of painting gesso over magazine images and then re-painting the image. I've also used coloured pencil to add some texture and shading.

In other news, I left a scrapbook challenge for Bridge who had lost her mojo. The challenge was to use the colour blue, clouds and lace. You can see the beautiful LO she created here.