Marriage and the Family Experience

This is a one-of-a-kind journal upcycled from a discarded sociology textbook, "The Marriage and Family Experience." I embellished the cover by first painting an undercoat of pink acrylic. I attached a copy of a vintage wedding photo and overlaid most of the cover with pieces of a damaged and discarded lace curtain. I further attached some bits of decorative trim and part of a discarded necklace. I hand tore the paper used for the pages along a straight and a variegated ruler to the size needed for the book cover. I bound the pages into the book cover using a wheat-bundle variant of long and kettle stitches. These are visible on the spine over ribbons, which serve to anchor the cover to the book block (a term meaning all the pages of a book as a whole). The book block contains nine signatures (a term for groups of pages). I include out-of-context quotes from the original book on several of the pages. These can be used as writing prompts.