Altered Silver

Along the way, I decided I had better build a block in one of the F&Ws before I'd sealed too many page-pairs to leave any room for one. Block-building in preparation for a niche is a technique which could be considered to be du rigeur in altered books, although of course, there are no rules and blocks/niches aren't necessary unless the artist wants them. Well, I wanted one, at least one.


Building a block is a very simple procedure. Just gather together a group of pages that will be deep enough for whatever might be put into them later. With wax paper protecting the rest of the book, I used matte medium along the edges only of the block pages, applying it liberally to thoroughly coat the edges. (I left a few raw pages both before and behind the block pages, since it's yet unknown if I might want to do something special with those in relation to the block.) The block was held together with binder clips to dry. To make sure the book remained properly open while drying, I also used another binder clip to hold the backend pages of the book, to stop them from flipping upward toward the block. The forward pages were given similar encouragement.


After the book had sat on the drying table for several hours undisturbed, I added a second coat of matte medium to the block edges. To do this, I had to first remove the binder clips from the block and discovered that in a couple of places, the medium had soaked through the pages and tried to adhere to the clips as well. Removing the clips resulted in some slight tearing of the outermost page edges. Nothing terrible, but to prevent a repetition of that, I added strips of wax paper between the block and the replaced clips.

I allowed this second coat to rest for two days before removing the binder clips and the wax paper strips. Now I have a very fine block which is about .75" deep. The next step will be to cut into the block to form a niche, but I won't be doing that part until I've firmly decided what I want to put into the niche or what shape the niche should be. I'm in no hurry, and meanwhile there are many other pages and techniques to work with.


Technorati Tags: altered books