This year, one of our summer reading program activities is making altered books (the fantastic idea of my co-worker). We take book donations, we rip out pages, we paint them, collage them, fold them, glue them, make them into journals or artworks, and I get paid for it. So, today I started practicing my altered book skills. I was using whatever I could find around the library, and the only paint I could find were these terrible water color sets that are part of these terrible art sets we bought for a previous teen program. I took some of the water colors and set myself up at the island in our workroom, and I went to work painting my practice book. The thing I loved about it (other than the fact that I was getting paid to paint a book) was that no one thought it at all strange that I was painting a book in the middle of the workroom. I had a conversation with a co-worker about her outreach patrons and the Hispanic Outreach Coordinator was wandering around and some people from Circ came in to drop things off and not a single person said, "MBC, why are you desecrating books?" Who needs to ask? I'm a teen librarian.
This is my teen pregnancy page. You can't see it well (I had a terrible time getting any kind of photos of these pages), but there are babies and rattles and a screenshot from Juno in the collage and then there are three books about teen pregnancy that pop up on the red bar.
I was working with whatever I had at my desk and what I had at my desk were photos from some of my trips. The picture is of me with a statue in Iceland, layered over drawings of robot parts.
7 comments:
Sometimes your job makes me hate you. You have great things to do (mostly). They are hiring a Young Adult section librarian in Yuma if you are interested. And you are already twenty times cooler than the old one.
i love the idea of altered books and i can't wait to make on of my own!
So cool! I was supervising some teens and one of the pulled out a book and began drawing in it in black ink--like coving the words with black ink. But then she explained it was an art project and showed me some of her other pages I thought it was really cool--and maybe she even read some of the words as she was drawing!
You've been to Iceland? I have honestly wanted to go to Iceland for years-the pictures I've seen make it look all cute and old European. Was it?
And Robinhood was VERY impressed! Hmm! :|
Eliana--Yuma is warmer than Utah . . .
Ann-Marie--I hope your book is full of secret drawers.
Yankee Girl--Iceland is fantastic. The buildings are charming and the landscape is AMAZING. There are volcanoes and geysers and glaciers and huge waterfalls and hardened lava flows all just right next to one another. I can see why Icelanders believe in the Hidden People and fairy tales, because the setting feels so primal.
Annie--You kill me.
You know, I made a chocolate sculpture in culinary school of a book with stuff exploding out the middle. My teacher so did not get it.
you know, you get mad when people say that librarians read all day, but then you go and do arts and crafts and plan chocolate parties?! dude, i need an mls.
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