Add a little touch of Halloween or straight up bibliophile glamour to your fall outfit with these recycled spell books, even the smallest amount of paper, card and leather can make one of these. So why not make a few and wear them all together?
What you'll need:
- Small piece of scrap leather, the more wrinkled and aged the better
- Small scrap of cardboard (hard back of a notebook would do fine)
- 1 piece of letter-sized printer paper
- Scrap of decorative paper
- 1 O ring
- Gold Sharpie pen (permanent marker)
- Scissors
- Hot glue gun
- Bull dog clip/bag clip
- Needle (to punch a hole)
- Yellow pages (to lean on)
1. Take one piece of printer paper (A4 if you're in the UK) cut it into 1 inch slices along the width of the paper. Divide the paper up into 5 smaller pieces which should measure roughly 1& 3/4 inches across. I used N.American letter-sized paper which I know is different to A4 so you'll have to play around with the sizes. Make a big pile of these rectangles then fold them in half and squeeze them with a bag clip/bulldog clip. All of the folded 'spines' should be facing the same side and that side should be poking out of the clip.
2. From the cardboard cut 2 rectangles, 7/8ths of an inch by 1 1/4 inches, these will be the front and back of the book, the spine should measure roughly 5/8ths by 1 1/4 inches.
3. Then tape them across the back leaving a hair's gap between the separate pieces, painters tape would be best but I used what I had.
4. If you left enough gap you should be able to fold the cardboard into a book shape.
5. Taking a scrap of decorative paper, draw around the book cover, depending on how large a gap you left the measurement for this will vary. Add double sided tape to the decorative paper and stick to the book cover, either side is fine.
6. Fold the book to give you a less flat book cover.
7. With a hot glue gun stick the wedge of papers folded 'spine' side down into the centre of the book cover, don't be scared to use a great big glob of hot glue, more is more in this case. Push down gently to make sure all the pages adhere nicely.
8. Give it a little squish if you want your book to sit more closed, don't if you want an open looking book.
9. With hot glue again take a scrap of leather and stick the outside of the book cover to it, you can trim round it once it's stuck, don't worry too much about the leather looking rough or feathered at the edges, it's meant to look old right?
10. Now for the fun bit, I used a Sharpie in gold with a fine tip and made a rough edge of gold around the outside of the book cover then smudged it with my finger to age it a little.
11. To give the spine more definition take the gold pen make a rough line and smudge it gently then add some small gold dots, smudging again if it looks too crisp. These books are teeny tiny so I was unable to add a legible title or writing to it. Instead, I made tiny dots of varying heights and smudged them. I just thought about where any text would be and put the dots there. In the pic below I gave the book yellowed pages by just scribbling along the book edges with a gold pen.
12. Punch a hole through the cover preferably with a needle and leaning on a yellow pages, making sure you also go through the cardboard (take it easy, I missed first time eek), add an O ring then put one or two on a chain, and wear them.
Have fun wearing your new necklace!
- Emma (Volunteer)
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