Tutorial: Golden Book Repurposing

So you might have seen people starting to sell old children's books remade into journals.  Well I'm here to show you how to do it :)  To be honest if you dont have the equipment it might be cheaper to go ahead and purchase one from a crafting seller.

Here we start off with a classic Golden Book.  Ok this isn't that vintage, but I really liked the cover art for this Cars Book.

Now to cut off the spin,  I like to use a circle blade cutter (on a cutting mat of course).  It runs pretty smoothly on the crease of the spine of the book.

See spin comes of pretty straight.

And it comes with pretty pages inside with all the same line cut.

Using a sprial bound hole punch to cut the holes.  I've purchased a whole stack of books, and I've noticed that GoldenBooks are the thickest cut my punch can go through, so some of the older books from the 70s just dont work out here.  But you also dont want a flimsy, just cause sturdy books are well, just more sturdy. 

Here's the more expensive piece of this project. I happen to have a spiral bound hole punch sitting in my room, not everyone has one and they are pretty pricey. 

The sprial bound punches ususally also come with a handy feature which stretches out the plastic spirals so you can slide your pages in.

Here we can include blank paper for drawing, line paper for journaling, or whatever else you desire.  I like to slip several pages of the original book in the middle to both section off chucks of the book and give back to the wonders of the story.

In my case the plastic spirals (purchase and the office supply store for pretty cheap) is too long.  But no worries, any handy dandy scissors cut those down the size really easily.

Yay now you have your own little self made journal.






WARNING:  Please practice using the sprial bound punch.  Here's some photographic evidence of my many botches.

Party Hats

My aunt had a great idea for something to do on New Year's Eve while we were waiting for the clock to strike midnight. She brought out scissors, glue, cardboard and leftover Christmas wrapping paper, and we all went to town making...

PARTY HATS!

OK yeah I went a little overboard and ended up making a boater hat and a mini top hat.

My sister modeled my hat for me. She is actually a professional actress, model and photographer in NY.

Tiny top hat!

Chewbacca approves.

Monopoly Cards

This was a fun project.  Ever though about reusing odd findings for your new cards?

Here I used a old Monopoly game set to create some new pieces.

Used a Die Cutter to cut out a tag from the monopoly board.  Can still write a special message on the backside which is blank.

In this case instead of using expensive paper I cut out a flower from Monopoly Community Chest cards, and instead of little flower stamens or a bead, I used the Monopoly House.

Kokeshi Drawings

Kokeshi are a wooden Japanese dolls .  They use to look a thinner and taller, but these are the more common versions now a days.

I wanted to do some drawings, becuase I thought they were quite cute

Here I was trying some different techniques with shading, and I ended up really liking the Flat Paper Doll look

So I continued to experiment with different characters

Euphemia from Code Geass

I tried playing with the outlining, and got some textures for the background to make it not complety boring

Voicaloid Rin and Len

Trying the paper shadowing again, and making my own texture, because I didn't feel like using other's people work for the textures all the time.  But to be honest, I think the background is rather ugly.

Inner Scouts from Sailor Moon

My favorite of the series.  Even though in the cartoon they mostly look like the same character with different colours and hair styles, following the manga instead gave me more variety to make the characters more unique.  At this point I like the simplicity of the background, doesn't distract from the characters.

Harley Quinn from Batman

Because not everyone is an anime fan, I did one of my favorite comic book characters.  I didn't know what I wanted to do for the background and was just going at random shapes.  Than using the colours of "Mr J" aka the Joker.  I ended up loving this combination, it really enhances Harley's connection with the Joker

Crafters In Disguise - SmallRiniLady and Ava

It's US, aint we cute