With a little help from my friends!

Did you ever have one of those days when you thought everything was going along so well and you turned a corner and disaster stuck!  Yesterday was one of those days.  I had cooked a new folded book and hoped to finish it as a gift.  When I opened it after it cooled, it looked great..  Then I turned a page and saw that the left page was blank and the right page was printed.  I had left a single page of paper in the book when it was cooked and it blocked the mirror print.  Other than that, the book was fine, but how do you gift a book with some pages printed and some not!

Dame Fortune appeared though in the form of an article I found In PAGES Magazine (Winter 2015 issue).  Jan LaFollette had an article showing two of her pieces of mixed media.  Wow!  Just what I needed when I needed it!

The single page had a beautiful print of Acer leaves, so I borrowed Jan's idea of a mixed media collage and completed the empty page.  I think it turned out fine.  Most of the book had been printed using the leaves of the Sand Pear Tree (Pyrus pyrifolia) along with some leaves of the Bradford Pear and some Acer leaves and Cosmos petals.  I borrowed Jan's idea of using a tea bag and I placed two leaves of the Sand Pear in the tea bag and stitched it down on the page.  I also used some torn pieces of Walnut-stained paper towel and three brown coconut shell buttons  I added two little strips of scrap lace on the bottom, one white and one ecru.  I stamped the year on the tea bag tag, and stitched the tag to the page with a zig zag stitch.  I used PVA glue to gently glue the tag string to the page so it would not snag when the book was opened.  After al of the stitching and glue was done,, I applied PVA glue to the entire back of the single page and added it to the blank page in the folded book.  I was happy with the finished result, I also added a few pieces of text to the page as a message to the recipient.  Here's a photo:

The book will be wrapped in white lambskin when done.

White lambsskin wrap cover, decorated with abalone shell and copper, gold and silver Czech glass  beads.