So had you forgotten all about this then? My altered book project has been just sitting in a box waiting for me to have time to tinker with it. This is stage 4: make a niche. My niche as you can see is forming a grave. Please forgive the photo (5th attempt and there are still shiny areas – I tried with flash on and flash off, lights on and lights off then finally with just the poor light from the window behind it and flash on!).

I really like grave yards as they are always tranquil places to sit or stroll through and it doesn’t matter if they are kept neat and tidy; sometimes the wilder they are – the more wildlife friendly they are. I have used a daisy trim on the grass – pushing up daisies (get it?). The skeleton is just a plastic one bought from the pound shop around Halloween time.

Using a pencil and ruler I marked out a rectangle where I wanted to cut the niche from and made sure there was enough room for the articles being secreted away there.

I placed a cutting mat under a few sheets at a time and using a sturdy craft knife (or carpet knife) and a metal edged ruler I cut out the rectangles. Keep going until the required depth. To glue them together, with mod podge, I just glued the inside edges and the outside edges rather than the whole page to reduce wrinkling.
I painted the inside of the niche a nice muddy brown colour using a mixture of brown acrylic paints. The head stones are photos of real headstones printed on white card and aged even more with distress inks. The left hand page was painted black, then an orange border rub-on added and coloured with alcohol inks. Using quite a dry brush I painted over the black with perfect pearls. Stamped the Grave tidings in versamark and swished over some green perfect pearls. The dragon is stamped using black ink. The right hand side is paper that looks a bit like grass darkened down with distress inks.