I love Altered art!!!

This is such a wonderful medium to express yourself in so many different ways. Mixed media ,altered art, altered books, Wow! the range is so wide and varied it really gives you so many choices to make your art. I started making fabric postcards in a group about 6 years ago , for about a year I made postcards of every imaginable kind,painted, printed , stamped,sewn. When I decided to try ATC cards, Loved it and did that for quite some time.
The next step for me was altered books, I loved the idea that you could tranform a child's board book or a tiny journal into something beautiful and a treasure that someone may cherish. The blank pages of any kind of book with or without text is an amazing canvas to do stunning backgrounds and add all sorts of beautiful images, distressed and antiqued to your liking.I did dozens of books and sold them on ebay, now, upon reflection , I wonder if I should have sold them or kept them to pass on to the women in my family. But so it goes.....
I love it all, altered bottles, altered dolls, cigar boxes trensformed into tiny worlds, substrates of every description, cardboard, plywood, canvas, photo paper, tiles, coasters,cereal boxes. Flowers made of coffee filters, rusted hardware, beads and wire. Fabric stained with coffee hanging on the line, waiting for me to make something that says This is Me!! I often think how lucky I am to have this way of expressing myself, because I can do something different every day if I choose.Once in a while I take a class for something, for a challenge, new ideas and the comradery of people of like interests. I enjoy that and learn a few things along the way.
So it goes.... I see everything in terms of altering it,throwaways are not to be thrown away, they are to be used and looked at with new eyes. I think my next venture is dolls. If you have anything to add to this ,feel free to comment. After all is said and done,we all love feedback.
The pictures are of an altered cigar box with a school theme, the figures in the right front are my father and my aunt Jane.
The top picture is of a theatre inside a theatre with a Marie theme, the second is a shrine for a paper whimsy door challenge(never turned it in) the third a fairy theatre, the fairies are on strings like marionettes.the bottom is the school shrine.