Ornament Thursday: MOTHERHOOD

I love looking at families and picking out familiar features through the generations. My mother and my sister look like twins from different time periods. I have all these wonderful photos of my mother's side of the fam & I love to get creative with them. I've wanted to do a book featuring family photos with stories, poems, and recipes for a while. And since this month's OT theme was motherhood, I got the inspiration to trace through 5 generations from my great grandmother to my niece.

This was my first attempt at doing an altered book. [Note to altered book artists out there: I welcome your advice & feedback--like what kinda glue do YOU use????] Back to the project: I chose an old Spanish textbook, which is appropriate since my great-grandmother's grandmother was Spanish. I printed out photos in black and white onto matte photo paper and then coloured them with coloured pencils. I used acrylic paints, metalic markers, and sparkley dimensional paint. I used regular glue and glued 5 pages together for each section for the first half of the book. Then I cut out a frame (you'll see) in the last half of the book.

Cover of book.

Mum's mum. Sparkley paint is not translating well in photo!

Niece & grandmother together.

After doing this water theme of Mum, I think I'll turn her into a mermaid!

Favourite photo of Mum & niece on left. Sister Mag & niece on right.

OK, let me splain. The end of the book is a family joke. When we were very young, we used to love to sift through Mum's jewelry box. My youngest sister Mag was about 5 at the time, and she would hold up some trinket and say v. innocently, "Mum, when you die, can I have this?" So that's the punchline at the end of the book.

For links to see the rest of the OT gang, click here.