Christmas Cards through the years... 2011

Now this year's 'card' (actually a book) started when my friend ND donated 12 scallops shells to me in November. I took them home and got busy thinking about what I could do with them...

Assemblage of materials:
Started collecting... the shells, pieces of mat board cut in various sizes, abalone shell my daughter brought back from her time in New Zealand, hand painted tissue papers in pinks and purples, and ripped pages out of the Lonely Planet Dominican Republic travel guide (picking particular pages that were about beaches around the island that were then painted browns and pinks, and stamped with shell images).

Glued four layers of mat board into a little platform to even out the bottom, so the book would lay flat.

Tops and bottoms...

The travel book pages were folded into a four-fold booklet. The abalone shell was glued onto the front cover to act as a weight. And inside was the coloured tissue paper with the Christmas message "shells...  beaches...  winter warmth...  Wishing you a winter break, even if only in your mind!"

Now isn't that 'ooh and aah' worthy!