Friday, November 30, 2012

Day 1: Shrink your Favorite Books

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We will be featuring tiny holiday projects every day until Christmas! This is the December 1 project, we just jumped the gun and released it early. Please check back December 2 for our mini walnut knitting ornament!

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With the holidays approaching I am once again struggling to come up with some inexpensive, original gifts for my family. How about you?
 First order of business for me: a present for my mom. She has a home filled with festive dishes, Matryoshka dolls, quilts, tea sets and books. I try to make her a gift every year. My mom is rather obsessed with the Bloomsbury Group. She collects their various first editions, gives a dramatic slide show detailing their capers and love affairs and for many years even had a big picture of Virginia Woolf hanging in her sewing room. (If you would like to see the Virginia Woolf quilt she made it is on Tumblr) So it did not take much imagination to determine that I should make her something featuring her favorite tortured author. I decided that at the same time I could make my daughter something for her dollhouse.






I started out by locating some book jackets on the internet. It is really easy to use Google images and locate the cover of your choice. Unless you obtain both the front and back image cover you will need to add on a rectangle that will be the book spine and back. I just filled the rectangle with color or texture and tried to match the cover. No one is going to look at the back of your book! I then reduced them in size and had them printed out at the copy store so they would be really high-quality images.

I cut out the covers and gave them to my husband, who is a woodworker. He cut me some wood scraps in the right sizes. The covers are all a little bit different so you might need a different size piece of wood for each one. Some are tall and thin and others are shorter and wider. If you don't have someone who can easily cut wood for you you might try using balsa wood, which is easily cut by amateurs with a knife. You also could stack and glue folded paper inside to fill the covers.





Some of the books will reside in a doll house and do not need a hook for hanging.  Others will need  to hang so that I can transform them into ornaments or jewelry. (Someone else in my family is getting a Nancy drew bracelet for Christmas!) To add a hangng ring glue on a short bent piece of wire prior to attaching the cover. Later on you can add a ring to the wire if you want.









Check out our latest creation: turn your old swingset into a play fort.




18 comments:

  1. This is such a great idea for a gift for my daughter who LOVES Harry Potter! :-) Thanks for the idea!

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    1. Thanks, and the Harry Potter book is a great idea!

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  2. Thanks for this great tutorial! The possibilities to use them are endless.

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  3. Such a great idea for an avid reader!! Love it, thanks for sharing! :)
    Desi

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  4. This is such a great idea! When my avid readers say this one of them proclaimed, "I need a whole necklace for the Percy Jackson series!" Thank you for sharing this tutorial.

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    1. I would love to see someone create an entire necklace for a series of books they love!

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  5. You could make the push pins and add one to your bulletin board every time you read a book - then you have your own personal record of your readings. I'm always forgetting the titles and/or authors of the books and this would be a great way to remember.

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    1. That is a really great idea, I would be so intrigued if I saw that in someone's house! Thanks for sharing.

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  6. Ooh I love this! I have just asked all my friends what their favourite book is on Facebook - but not told them why I'm asking... Guess what everyone is getting for their birthday!!!!
    http://buttonsandpaint.blogspot.co.uk/

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    1. Hi Again! Finally got round to this project, and have done a post on it linking back to you guys of course! Hope you like it! Thanks again for the inspiration!
      http://buttonsandpaint.blogspot.co.uk/2013/03/minibookbookmarks.html

      xx

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    2. Wonderful, thanks for sharing!

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  7. Ha ha ha, these are SO COOL! I'm going to make a charm necklace-every time I read a book, on the charm goes. This is an AMAZING idea!

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    1. I love that, I want to make a miniature library of all the books I've read now..if only I could remember them all!

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