a sailor's log book

andrew mentioned he was going on a sailing trip next week. so i made a log book for him. (ulterior motive is for him to write to me daily! haha) but this is also an example of an altered art project. the mainframe or casing for this project was a disposable cd cover. i was going to bin it the other day when i realised the "altering" potential for it! (:

as i wanted the whole project to flow, and since this was a rather small piece, i used one 12" by 12" paper for the whole of it. been really into making my own "embellishments", like the skully here - which i mentioned in the previous post about my obsession lately with embroidery.

and the thing is you don't have to be very exact in your measurements. what i did was to cut the paper to leave a smallish border around the base, and then i dabbed brown acrylic all over the edges. it covers up any exposed areas and at the same time distresses the edges.
another "3R's" (reuse, reduce, recycle) tip is comic strips from the newspaper. in this case, it was an old political cartoon i found. i made it into a little book, in which i'm going to write a little something each day for andrew to read.
and this is the log book. i just stapled some sheets of cut up notebook paper, added some pictures and embellishments. i didn't want to do anything too complex because i know andrew wouldn't use it if it was.
another tip is that if you wanted to do something fast but didn't want it to look too plain, a busy patterned paper should do the trick. it gives colour and attention, but yet you don't need to do too much.
the skully acted as a binding post too. so its all good. (:
arr! ahoy matey!

*sheryl