Books for Bookworms...

Yesterday afternoon, I made 29 books...That was not enough.

I thought you might like a couple of quick ways to make books for your bookworms.

First you find a baby rhino to hold the paper down....Just kidding.  Actually, he wandered in all by himself.

In the first photo, I have the steps to making a faux book.  I am going to be gluing these into the bookcases, so they don't have to have pages that work.

You have a choice.  Either the fake ones that are just fillers or the ones that really open.

First, for the fakes, I use white or beige fun foam.  I cut it into various sizes(under one inch both ways) for the inside of the books.

For the outside, I use either patterned card stock or really thin leather.

I cut a 1" strip of the outer material and glue an inside piece to one end.

In the case of the leather, I simply fold it around and glue it to the front, spine and back.  Then I trim closely to the inside of the book.  For the card stock, I score a line next to the inner edge of the interior  and fold the book up.  See above.  Then I score another line by where the rhino has his nose.  In other words, I am creasing between the sides and the spine, so that I will get a straight fold.

Then I glue the back cover to the last page and trim with a small pair of scissors all around.

If I want pages that move, I cheat a lot of the time.  The pad that you see behind the other stuff is from the dollar store.  I can get a lot of books out of that...  I use the gummed edge for just a few or I spread white glue along the edges of all four sides and that gives me more.  If you are careful lining the edges up, you can do that to the whole thing.  Or if you are lazy, you can use their gummed edge and use the rest of the pad for scratch paper.  The strip of white, by the Exacto is one that I just cut off of the top by putting a ruler in place and running the knife along it until I had enough pages for the book that I wanted.  From the strip, I then cut individual books.  I followed the same procedure for this kind as I did for the solid one.

Here are the bookworms full of books.  This is not what they will look like when I get them in the room, but I wanted you to see that they hold a surprising number of books.

I will probably intersperse a few other things between the books, so that they don't look so crowded.

Now for the desk.

See you tomorrow.