Paperback Christmas Tree DIY

Last fall, I was strolling through a street fair, and spied a very cool crafty item:  a pumpkin made from a paperback book!  (Google Image it, you will see what I mean!) Well, thought I, I could do that too!  And so I did…and now that it is the Christmas season, I decided to double down and make a tree the same way, with two used paperbacks.  Warning to librarians; this will be hard to watch...I tried to choose books that were already of dodgy subject matter and in bad physical shape, if that buys me any points.  Here is the project:

Step 1.  Go to Goodwill or your local thrift store and choose some paperbacks to be sacrificed.  If you are doing a double-book tree, try to find books whose interior pages are roughly the same color and type font.  Extra credit if you can find them in French or another language--so chic  and worldly! 

Step 2.  Get sick of seeing the same two books sitting on your kitchen counter taunting you…and teach them a lesson.  Get a pair of scissors or an exact-o knife (do I need to tell you that you should have a cutting board surface to protect your counter AND the knife is very sharp, so don’t blame me if you get a wound?) and then draw a template of the tree on the books.  You do need to decide who goes on top.  I mean which.  Book.  Geez, really, this is a family friendly blog, so let’s not dabble in the gutter please.

Step 3.  Spend the next hour cutting away all the pages until you have the entire shape cut out of both books.  This will cause an unbelievable mess.  Cannot be helped.  You will also need to take the cover off the front, back and as much of the spine as you can reasonably do.  You will need to flex the spine so that it is as round as it can be, and you need to do this before you glue the two ends together.

Step 4.  Glue with tacky glue (or whatever works for you…if using hot glue, please don’t burn your fingers) the first two pages together, and the last two pages together….then glue the front and back together.  (if you only do the first and last, the pages are too weak to hold together and will probably tear…that’s why I reinforce them by gluing the extra pages to themselves)  You will probably need to clamp them together somehow (chip clips and rubber bands were my choice) so that the glue has a chance to hold together….give them about an hour to dry, or less if using hot glue.

Step 5.  Now you have the top and bottom shapes, fluff them so that they are full in the round…then take some bamboo skewers and place them in the hole in the bottom book, then place other book on top with the skewers keeping the tree together.

 

Step 6.  You really need to clean up the mess.  Now.  Before someone from the hoarder’s channel sees you and reports you.  Be sure and show the new dazzling craft off to everyone in the household (the kittens were the only ones who were impressed, but I forge on anyway) and then decide to top it with a fluff of raffia (abstract star or a bow) or a pile of cranberries (fake, glued together) and then place it somewhere that can be admired by all who come to visit.   And you didn’t even have to read the books!  Fini!

Plus, for added holiday specialness, it snowed today!  Lucky that we had the snow tires put on the car this morning!  I might not post tomorrow, because we are having our family holiday Christmas celebration.  Yepper, you are correct.  We are 9 days early.  My dad is going through Chemotherapy for his newly diagnosed Lymphoma…and he can’t be around people (other than my Mom) on the actual Christmas Day holiday (for his lowered immune system), so we moved the family get-together for him!  There is a 23 lb turkey brining away on my deck right now.  So, I might post tomorrow… or I might just pass out from the tryptophan (and not the double serving of stuffing & taters thankyouverymuch)…we will just have to see…