Tearing pages out of your AB

Now that you have the book, it is time to tear out some pages. You need to do this because the bulk of the embellishments, extra pages, and paint will bulk up your book. How many pages you take out will be up to you. You can always tear out more later. Think about how many spreads you want to have and that will affect how many you tear out as well.

When you glue pages together for strength, you can glue together 2 or more pages. Depends on what you are putting on that spread. You will need to glue together the pages on either side of the spread. You can use liquid glue, PVA, gel medium, double sided tape, and masking tape. How you do it does not matter. Just realize that with any liquid glue, you might get some crinkling of the pages. Remember that the AB does not have to be perfect. That is the beauty of an altered book.

Back to the tearing. I tear out maybe two-four pages at a time. Stay away from the front and back of the book. Tearing pages out there will weaken the book. Also, do not tear out too many pages from one signature - group of pages sewn or glued together. That will also weaken the book and cause the pages on the other end of the signature to fall out. I tear about 1/4" or more from the spine. You can use a straight edge, exacto knife, or scissors to do it. You can see in the top pict that is what I did. I drew little lines where the tear lines were.

In the second pict from the top, I tore closer to the middle in case I wanted the extra part for a tip-in, pictures, tags, or whatever. I could always tear off the excess later. The third pict down shows staggered tearing which is great for putting in different tags, pictures, etc...in different positions in the tears. You can also color each tear portion.

In the last pict, I tore down a little and then tore horizontally so I could make that into a pocket later on.

So, your mission now is to tear the pages out of your book (you can save it for another project or for backgrounds) and glue together your pages to make blank spreads. Leave a few spreads without the pages glued together so I can show you how to do slit pockets.

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