Inspiration Avenue: Hands

This week Shel and her mother Loretta chose the weekly Inspiration Avenue challenge, which lasts until noon on Mother's Day. I had not planned to enter this week, because I honestly don't have time to prepare anything. But with the challenge being HANDS, how could I not dig up a few of my Hands AB pages to show everyone.


These could be a mother's hand holding all these concepts.


Of course, a mother might teach her children to achieve their vision. But words of encouragement aren't the only things found in this altered book.


There are whimsical pages,


holiday pages,


and pages using vintage images and matching tissue.



Hands from other cultures can be showcased, especially if they are made from polymer clay.


I'm sure most people would be aware of X-rayed hands. The "real" X-rays are covering the book pages and also act as embellishments in the corners, while magazine images become the important focal elements on these two pages.


I have been reading that Inspiration Avenue participants are part of a postcard swap. Mail from other countries, all "hand stamped," is always welcome.


Sometimes we wear our hearts on our sleeves, and other times they become electric hand held (or sewn) hearts.


Those who are following along in my AB class know I use gesso as a covering for AB pages as well as a glue. Here I did both! I was very lucky to find the right magazine image for the spread.


For this two page spread, I began with some silk fabric I dyed. Next, I stamped several images, then layered hand dyed cheesecloth and hand dyed silk over the background fabric and sewed them together. After ironing the assembly into my AB, I added two tape transfers I made from magazine images. To get a better idea of the texture, I hope you will be able to enlarge this spread.


This is a zipper spread in my Hands AB. I had never put a zipper in a book before, so this was a real challenge. Closed, the page is made up of magazine images and various scrapbook papers.


Open, the zipper reveals a hidden page. I used my handmade paper and wallpaper to hide the zipper elements and to fill in around the inside image.


After I had been making this AB for awhile, I discovered sewing on paper. Both the front (or at least I'm calling this the front)


and the back show how I incorporated the sewing, even though I don't have a machine that has feed dogs.


I made the background for these two pages at the same time I started my Hands AB. It was when I removed excess pages from my soon-to-be AB. I cut two "hand" stamps from potatoes and colored the pages using lime green ink. I had SO many extra little images that made no sense or were not cohesive that I had to figure a way to incorporate them. I have several pages like the ones above.

These are not necessarily my favorite Hands AB pages, but they were the first ones I ran across. And since my time was limited this week, it was easy to search for AB pages and copy them onto this post.

Thanks again to Loretta and Shel for this week's challenge. Had it been ANYTHING other than Hands, I would not have played (or rather had time to play). Now I must remember to link to Inspiration Avenue on Friday (the day I post my IA challenges) because this is definitely a scheduled post I finished Monday night.

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