Review of The Ultimate Guide to Smash Books, by Mahe Zehra Husain–and a Giveaway!

If you can’t get enough of smash books, check out my review of Mahe Zehra Husain’s newest e-book, The Ultimate Guide to Smash Books, Smashing and Making Your Own Upcycled Smash Books, then read to the end to learn how to receive your own free copy, as well as The Ultimate Guide to Upcycling and a series of video classes on upcycling paint chips into greeting cards.

Smash books are the perfect format for the eco-friendly crafter. Instead of a scrapbook, which can be painstakingly laid out and often encourages the consumption of loads of little stickers, brads, doo-dads and other meaningless store-bought decorations, a smash book’s layout is more intuitive and free-form, and less fussy, all of which makes it a terrific environment for upcycling some very non-traditional components.

Some of the upcycled materials that Mahe discusses in The Ultimate Guide to Smash Books include soda cans, plastic packaging (for a more detailed look at how to die cut and emboss soda cans and plastic packaging, check out my review of Crafty Cans and Perplexing Plastic, also by Mahe Zehra Husain), fabric scraps, and paper scraps and other ephemera.

For instance, Mahe recommends using pages from upscale glossy magazines or catalogues as background imagery for smash book pages, and upcycling lovely greeting cards as smaller pages-within-a-page–any distracting text or images can simply be covered with patterned paper or gessoed over and painted anew. For my smash book pages of my daughter’s pirate birthday party, I gessoed over the pages of an old children’s encyclopedia, then painted, glued, and drew directly on top of the gesso to create the pages.

Want to know more? For a limited time, Mahe is giving away a free copy of her e-book, The Ultimate Guide to Smash Books, to EVERY reader of Crafting a Green World. Along with the e-book, Mahe would also like to give you a copy of her e-book, The Ultimate Guide to Upcycling, as well as access to her online video series on upcycling paint chips into greeting cards. To receive your free books and tutorials, please do the following:

1. Go to Mahe’s Altered Upcycling page and sign up to join the mailing list.
2. Like the Altered Upcycling Facebook page.
3. Leave a comment below to say that you’ve done both 1. and 2.

Don’t forget to put your email address in the contact form as you leave your comment–Crafting a Green World will never sell or give away your email address to anyone except Mahe, so that she can send you your prizes!

This offer ends on Sunday, August 5, at 7:00 am EST, and you can expect an email from Mahe in the week after.