Non-quilting projects

I guess my previous post was too long; Blogger wouldn't let me add more :-). A few months ago, in this post, I mentioned that GameBoy had selected some Eric Carle fabric while we were checking out a quilt shop in Berlin, Ohio. To the left it is hanging on his wall, finally. All I did was find some artist canvasses--I wanted the stretcher bars actually, but the canvasses from JoAnn's worked--and staple the fabric to it. You can see that the stretcher bars for the middle fabric were a titch too long, but GameBoy didn't care. And then I hung them on his wall. He is a sunny boy and so his room is painted yellow and orange.

Our bathroom is teeny-tiny, and for months now, I've wanted to hang hooks and sew loops to color-coded towels, to save room and also encourage people to hang their towels back up. This week I was able to do that:



And I took my first tiny steps into making altered books. Clearly, this is an inexpensive lined notebook, bought at a back-to-school sale:

First I stapled groups of pages together:
And then I painted (applied?) gesso to the pages:
And that's as far as I got. The next step is to glue pretty papers to the cover, and I am stripping magazines to make a collage for my first entry.

A close-up: The lines show through but I think I like that

I am also working on this year's Christmas angel, a small tatting project, and a small wooden Christmas ornament project. If those work out, they will be presents, so no pix until they're distributed.

EDIT: I forgot to mention that the instructions for the towel loops were from Martha Stewart's website, here. They're very easy.