I made this because I wanted to do a new cover for a pair of short stories I was republishing, one of which is “Gingerbread House.”  My current strategy for book covers is “make something cool and take a picture of it” so I made a batch of dough and created a pattern out of chipboard.  This is what I came up with.

I wanted to make this easy, so I used regular cookie decorating frosting rather than the royal icing you’re supposed to use.  I wanted to fill a jacquard bottle with the icing.  It proved very difficult to fill the bottle. I used hot glue to attach the walls and roof together, and filled the space with icing afterwards.  I didn’t bother to decorate the back side, because it was so hard to get the icing out of the jacquard bottle that my hand kept cramping.

I made this because I wanted to spend the afternoon doing art, and playing with polymer clay is a good one-day project. I have a book on making mosaics and mosaic tiles from polymer clay that I have been using as inspiration for a while.  I especially liked the icon images, which I took from a Met catalog.  I didn’t have any of the frames that the books suggests using, so I used an empty watch bezel.

This is an altered book that I started a while ago. I’d been using different pages for different techniques, but I’d left this page, with the three cut-out alcoves alone.

I wanted to work with the juxtaposition of teal with that apricot color. I love these two colors together. First I took the blue art paper and used my silk screen of the wings to make wings with interference paint. You can’t see it very well, which is kind of nice, because if it weren’t subtle it might overwhelm it. Then I painted the interior of the little alcoves in the bright yellows and oranges.

After that, I glued the paper on and carefully cut out the squares. It’s not hard, as I can feel the crisp edge of the paper block. Then I had to sift through my stuff and find things that worked. I had the polymer clay face with interference paint on it, and I added mica pigments to the tiles and the polymer clay tablet-tile.

As with many things I do, it wasn’t exactly what I wanted, but it came out okay. I learned some things. I especially learned that it’s a pain in the butt to photograph altered books. They just don’t like to lay open.

These are my favorite of the February batch of bottlecaps. I like the watch face because of its complexity, the baby’s arm because it’s creepy, and the bolt over the flower because it works from a composition standpoint.