Self Help - altered book style

My craft studio is not really "there" yet, but i can get my hands on enough supplies to put together a couple of pages in Carol's altered book: Self Help.

I was flipping through an old anthropologie catalog and tore out some pages with green floral curtains. Not sure what i would do with them exactly - but i liked them. Living in a rental with hideous white vertical blinds, will make you dream about whimsical anthropologie curtains. Even if i WAS planning to buy curtains, it is unlikely they would be these! But that is the cool thing about altered art. You can create your own colour themes on paper - without spending a dime, or tormenting your husband with your ever changing decorating moods.

I started with a blank spread and just layered on torn strips of the curtains along each outer edge. In the middle i glued in some trees in a mist. I also saved some buddha heads from a mail order catalog. I added those as the focal point. For accent i added a strip of copper tape, and cut the word ZEN from wide copper tape. It is actually slug tape - you ca get it in the garden section of a hadrware store. Yes - i attached the E backwards on purpose -i thought it looked better. I only realized why later.

Because my Z is also backwards. Duh.

While looking for some additional embellishment i came across a green tea bag packet. It did not really fit anywhere on the page - so i cut a slit and created a pocket for it. Punch a hole and attach some fibres and voila, a tag!

Continuing on the green theme - i wanted to use this image from a magazine of a path of stones. I created two flaps from card stock attached with tape to the pages. I wanted to cut the pages so that they overlapped - but it did not work along the crease. So i added some vegetable netting to create some "greenery" in the space. Trust me - my craft supplies are still in such disarray, that i did not go LOOKING for green vegetable netting. I just happened to see it on the top of a pile.

Since Carol instructed us to create pages reflecting self help, but with a sense of humour - i knew i had to add something unexpected inside the flaps. What a better way to relieve stress (albeit temporarily) than with a sweet treat. Or four. Chocolate cupcakes with strawberry icing. It does not get any better than that.