Blessings

Over the past couple of weeks I have been altering a book I found at the EXTREMELY junky liquidator shop near our house.  

I must admit, I love that shop.  The people who run it are paranoid about shoplifting, as if I really wanted to steal dusty post it notes from an estate sale, or faded pictures of girls in white dresses and blue satin sashes, or teensy weensy little wrenches, although those are TOO cute, really.  But, I am sure they have plenty of experience with even that type of item just walking off.  Signs everywhere, in every dusty nook and cranny, warn me that "YOU ARE BEING WATCHED!!!!"  

But they do have the coolest books,  old ones from old  houses in town.  I found this one, called The ABC's of Chafing Dishes, published in 1956, a good year, if I do say so myself.  Now, here is a subject we all could stand to learn more of.  However, I don't own a chafing dish, and am not sure I even know what one is, but I loved the color of the book.  It was just so cute, and only 99 cents, so that was a bargain.

I decided to make a Count Your Blessings book, using the words and pages from a VERY old hymnal I have had for a long time (from another cool secondhand bookstore around here).  

WARNING: CRAFT LESSON COMING UP...SKIP IF NOT INTO THIS STUFF...

I do have to share one thing I discovered on my own,  and please forgive me if you are not into altered art and don't have a clue what I am talking about, but I am pretty proud of this one...

I had an older page of word stickers that was almost empty.  The stickers look like those labels you make with the plastic tape and the old type turn-the-dial label makers.  We used to have one growing up, and I have two now.  But anyway, these were stickers, not real labels, (see the Grandma label on the Grandchildren page below).  I was going to throw away the base paper of the stickers and noticed that the paper was slightly tacky, and also that you could read the words on the base paper, because it was embossed, just like the stickers had been.  I remembered something I saw online one time about using this powder called Perfect Pearls, which I happen to have.  I wondered whether I could dust the Pearls powder over the raised letters and would they look like metal labels, then?  I tried it and was amazed at how cool they looked.  Those are the copper labels you see on each page...just Perfect Pearls powder dusted and rubbed into the throw away backing for a sheet of labels, then cut out and glued in place.  

Pretty cool, huh?  And totally done with stuff I would have tossed.  I LOVE that.

I have a total of 36 Blessings (actually, I have many more, but that is how many pages ended up in my book).  I doubt anyone wants to see all of them,  so here are just some of the pages from the finished book.  

(And I am also especially pleased with the little songlet I found for the Mariner's page...since I couldn't find any baseball songs in my hymnal... :)

And you, you are a blessing, too, even if you don't have your own page.

(Yes, Erin and Alison, my sweet blessings, you are on a page, I just didn't post a picture of it.)