This is an altered old Donna Hay cookbook. Using bright coloured panels from some advertising industry brochures. using the 3d of roof tops, with cut out windows and spaces. I received the book, called Simple Essentials in 2008 from Energy Australia. My blog post was August 2012, but that may be a dummy date. Everything is hand cut, and it was a labour of love to make the different layers show through.
I used scans of these pages and made another book from them and this one here in 2012 (*again, maybe).
In 2026 I added a title page, fixed the front page, added a few comments. I am mid-redo, using different colour combinations. I wanted the brightness of these colours, so when Avril gave me Tinspiration with its marvellous colours, it seemed the right thing to do!
I approached it as a cricut challenge, making different templates, with skylines at different heights, so i could use the top and the bottom of the page. I glued selected mostly block coloured tinspiration pages to the sides of bright coloured cardboard from my collection, setting it up so the book would be 21 x 21, but cut 21 x 42 on the cricut. I knew that the hand cutting was sloppy and hard last time, and there’s still bits of the under-pages showing.
So I figured if i cut the pages with the cricut first and then bound them into a book, rather than altering a book, i’d be able to manipulate them more easily. This is true, it means also i can treat the pages with stamps or whatever if i want to. I’ve already begun the second round of this one, because i’ve misplaced Tinspirations, but here’s what I learnt and am applying:
- pages should suspend from the top AND from the bottom
- backing only half the page was what i did, but then it meant some of the card wasn’t shiny enough, so i’m having to treat the pages, which is more work (work doesn’t matter, except if i did it again i’d like to get it right) – use or back a whole page
- glue with PVA so there’s no gaps (the glue stick wasn’t EVERYWHERE on the back, so i have had to patch)
- to get through cardboard and a layer of tinspiration paper i neede to choose artboard with a fine point blade 270gsm was insufficient, even when using the harder setting
- I’m missing the water towers in my new version (and certainly no onions!)
- I made 4 separate cricut patterns, but maybe I need more like seven, and of course I need to go back to this original book to get variety – what I did was copy the first one, and then manipulate it, but it meant i kept similar rooflines.
- There needs to be more windows – i’m fixing this on the tinspiration one by using a circular hole punch and cutting in a few big spaces, but the joy is in seeing through – and yet there needs to be some not-windowed spaces (the bottom or top sections of the page in the original) for the windows to see through to.
