Really....I'm, I'd safely say, 75% done with the Reversing Vandalism book! wohoo! I finally had to give up the search for a cardboard cigar box. Ya know, it used to be every year when school started you could find them for the kids to use as pencil boxes. Some even came ready to be decorated/colored by the kids. Now? Because I want/need one? Nowhere. And none of the tobacco or liquor stores I've tried (and that would be a lot of them!) have had no empties.
So I gave up tonight and painted the wooden one V had in the closet. Just means I have to slightly revamp how I planned to do the battery pack, but it's not a major thing! I even have that niche carved in the last half of the book. Now fo the big picture window while I wait for clothes to finish in the dryer.
Up til now I have the firs 6 blocks completely complete. Block 7 will be the last "free" block, block 8 will have to be installed. I now have the box, and it has 2 coats of acrylic paint laid down. Tomorrow night I can start to mosaic the covers/spine onto it. I guess I'll need to get V to drill the holes in the "spine" once I've antiqued it and sealed it sufficiently. Oh! I still need the ball-chain, but I can get that at the craft store. It's really the last thing I'll need I think.
In other altered news the AB round robbin is going along swimmingly. Each book I work in makes me feel that much more confident of my abilities and my preferred style (though not as much as 'Out'--it's ben a major confident booster). As much as I do enjoy it (both projects) the dealines are starting to become wearing. I will be glad to see both of them come to a pleasant close so that I can reconcentrate my efforts elsewhere again.
honest....I'm going to update soon! Til then let's tangle...tell he how you faired in the comments.
Otherwise I might really be up a creek.
I received my Reversing Vandalism book today: Coming Out Every Day, "A gay, bisexual, or questioning man's guide" and being a non-questioning heteosexual female I don't have a lot of personal insight to the details discussed within it's battered pages. It came to me with it's cover slashed (i'll post some pictures tomorrow, it's kinda late in the evening to upload any right now) through to the first chapter and a little beyond, and a page marker noting where the vandal had filled in one of the questions with some rather crude, pornographic, unimaginative words.
The book is softcover, glue-bound, so will probably need some creative binding once the altering is completed.... It's about the right size to place in a cigar box...so many it will become an altered installed book by the time it is done. I have a month and a bit to get it done and sent back to San Francisco by October 11th.
I'm probably going to go with the obvious "coming out" theme and just expand on all the things that come out or can be come out of. Well, maybe not all of the things, but a good many of them. Obviously a closet might be one of those things, but I was thinking also:
*out from under a cloud
*out of a cocoon (good spot for a pop-up tole butterfly)
*out of the blue
*out of confusion (two head profiles cross-sectioned, the brain labelled, question marks on one half, light bulb on the other...trite but effective...)
*out of the dark (dark vellum fly leaf over a brighter picture)
and then, finally, the point:
*out from under persecution (maybe a collage of burned books, witches on the stake, Jews in the Holocaust)
Hmmm....that's not a bad starting point, anyone else have any ideas? Now would be the time to share them while I look for materials and such over the next week or so.