Little Books

Hello friends,

Today I'm sharing how I make the tiny books that come in our ephemera packs. The books are usually used in idea-ology vignettes.  They are great to fill in a small spot or to stack to raise some things up.

Lets get started:

As I mentioned the seasonal ephemera packs come with many little book covers, so the first thing to do is choose what covers you will use! 

1.  Cut a piece of Distress Kraft Heavystock to fit each cover.
2.  Use Collage Medium to add Heavystock to the cover. 
3.  Score cover on spine and gently fold to create the book shape.

4. Cut long strips of paper (about 8").  I used paper cut from old books. Then fold them into little bundles.  You can fan-fold them but I just rolled them with a small spot of Collage Medium at the turn. You will need 4 "bundles" per book. 

NOTE: if your paper is thicker than the vintage book paper I used, then you may not need as many bundles.

5.  Once you have all four bundles, glue them together in a stack, making sure they are flush on the left edge.

6.  Add a good amount of Collage Medium to the book, especially the spine.

7.  Push the bundle into the book, so it is flush with the spine.

8. Use your scissors to cut off the excess paper on the right side.

9.  Then use a large clip to hold it all in place till it dries.

I found that sometimes my books came out a big slanted when I didn't add enough paper.   A "slanted" book is not a problem if it is standing, but of you are going to stack the books, then it can become the Leaning Tower of Piza. So to fix the problem, just insert a small piece of chipboard into the center of the book.  The book will level up and you will never even see the "fix" in the stack.

Another thing I would like to mention is that the are a couple Snippet packs that work well with the little book covers.

Snippets Curator is on the left. They work perfectly with so many things because they are so small.  Great on both book covers and bottles!

On the right are Snippets Number Strips. These are a bigger than Curator but still there are many that would work, especially if you were wrapping them around the spine of the book.

Here are a couple examples of how I have used the little books in projects.

Here you can see I used some heavyweight paper (Mixed Media Heavystock) to make the pages for a more grungy industrial look. I still LOVE this project so much!

My recent Halloween project.  Here the books are thin as I didn;t have as much space.

And these are thicker - I wanted a chunky spine to fill the space.

I hope this answers some questions about building the books.  I am sure many other Makers have posted how they create them (mine is surely not the only way to do it), so whatever way to choose fill the books, that is the right way!

Now carry on,
paula