'Downtown Tea Party' Minibook

by Julie Kirk

Hi again.
For my second project with 'Downtown Tea Party' - the latest Quirky Kit - I used the papers and embellishments from the kit to decorate a micro-book as a birthday gift for a friend:

My cover features a painted chipboard heart to which I added one of the kit's butterflies in turquoise and one of the gorgeous cerise pink resin rose beads.

The tie closures are made from twisting together a strand of each of the various colours of Pink Paislee baker's twine:

To decorate the tiny pages I simply tore and roughly cut, sections from the various papers down to size.

Here's a little snippet from the Pink Paislee Daily Junque ‘Tickets’ design which I glued onto the book's existing page:

Next I glued down half a Shabby Chic Crafts journaling card on top of which I added a yellow paper butterfly.
Once my glue dried I ran the page - as I did every page in the book - through my sewing machine with a contrasting black thread, trying here to give the impression of antennae:

I continued throughout the book, decoratively stitching-down the small strips of the paper as I went along:

To add another level of detail and texture to the book I splattered, smeared and scraped complimentary coloured paints along, around and across it.

I used white paint where I wanted a plain base on to which I could stamp my chosen words:

It was such a tiny gift, which you can judge by its size compared to my thumb here:

... so I decided to make it a protective bag from the candy pink tulle net fabric from the kit:

It was simply a piece cut to size, folded and stitched on the machine along the bottom and side.

To fasten - I just wrapped another length of  baker's twine around it and tied a bow:

Using your kit on something so small is a great way to:

• see a great combination of lots of the papers all at once, in a small space;
• make a big feature of those small butterfly and journaling block embellishments;
• experiment with a few messy techniques [like paint splattering and border stamping] on a tiny canvas - with less romm for error!
• use up scraps once you've already used your kit to make several layouts.

If you'd like a few more close-ups of the detail of the book check out this post on my blog  and I'll be back here soon with something more 12x12-sized I think!

See you soon.
Julie  :-)