It might just come in useful !!

"I'm saving that," is a phrase heard around here a lot recently. After looking at the Internet and books it became apparent that there is tons of stuff that could be made into books. 

    The first thing I did was a vintage game board I found. This was before I started looking at the rubbish we throw away every day. 

This is the front and back before the pages were added then 2 views of the finished book. 

     Then I decided to try using tea bags as the colour attracted me so I dried some out. Originally it was going to be an artist book with drawings and writing about tea. This didn't work out too good. So then decide to draw mini landscapes on them and bind into a book. I then realised lots of people are painting on tea bags, my friend Maggie Goodwin is doing a portrait a day on tea bags you can find her on Instagram. I ended up cutting of 3 sides of the bags and using the outside "page" and the inside one to paint on. Had a total of 20 paintings. Used the bits I had cut off to make a cover and used a scrap of pigs skin to make a case.

Then I planned a large painting of Ribblehead viaduct using tea bags to paint the individual parts of it. This is still work in progress. 

The next teabag adventure was sewing teabags together so I could made a larger book cover. 

All this has caused a mass of teabags in various stages of drying around the kitchen. 

   Then came the books made from carrier bags, corriagated card board, drinks cans. 

This is my excuse for a cluttered house. "It might just come in useful".