Poe Skelleton Book

Yet another fabulous Alpha Stamps Swap. This is the second Halloween themed swap that is being hosted this year.

For this swap participants purchased the mini book and were to decorate it using a Halloween theme. The swap is called the Skeleton Book Swap.

As always I didn't want to do something expected. This time I decided to go with non traditional Halloween colors. Yes, green is used for witches but when you think about Halloween it is not one of the colors that comes to mind, at least not to mine.

I started by layering torn book pieces all over the pages. Then I dry brushed them with a green tinged gesso mixture. When that was dry I aged the pages by applying three different shades of brown distressing inks and stippling black along the edges. As a finishing touch I over stamped all that with a cracked background stamp. When I finished the backgrounds I just kind of set them out and admired them for a bit...I really like the way the background came out.

The main image portion are wine labels purchased from Alpha Stamps that I aged using the same distressing inks. The wine labels had a red boarder on them so I decided to cover it up with a dark green glitter to keep with my color scheme. I really like the way that turned out on the Arsenic labels...

I didn't want to hide the labels so I used transparent Poe images. One of the downsides of transparencies is that you almost always can tell how they were attached. To hide where I placed the glue I used some fabulous black and green metal flowers. I wish I had purchased more.

One of my favorite stamps from Alpha Stamps is this crow on a branch. I stamped him onto some grunge board, cut it out and painted it with a high gloss black acrylic paint. As a finishing touch I attached a black rhinestone for the eye. I almost always have to paint anything that I stamp on grunge paper b/c the image doesn't take well...anyone know some tricks?

The little glass viles I just couldn't resist. I stamped the skull and cross bones onto tissue paper then stippled some green onto them. Cut it out and attached it to the glass using modge podge. Once it was dry I painted the cork with a sharpie and filled it with black glitter. Punched a hole in the outer most corner of the pages (they are all slightly skinnier so the vile shouldn't get in the way of the page in front of it) and attached it with the ribbon.

There was some left over space on the right hand side of the page so using my new Alpha Stamp Halloween stamps I filled that space with various sized skull and crossbones stamps. Finishing the front off with the black fringe.

On the backs I didn't get as elaborate. I painted them with the same color paint I used on the front and stamped them with the cracked background stamp. Then I typed up The Raven poem putting three stanza's on each page. If you flip through the entire book the entire poem is there but since they will be swapped out no one will get the entire poem. After it printed out I burned the edges...FYI velum burns a lot faster than regular paper. To finish it off I stamped the crow stamp again and signed each page.

These are already on there way to be swapped out...I can't wait to see what I get in return.