Got any books left over from the book sale in Atwater?  Some may say there’s never an excuse to rip up a book, but for something as pretty as this I beg to differ.  Living with Lindsay has a great tutorial for book page wreaths and they look like something you’d find at Anthropologie for 239 million dollars.  Fortunately, you can make it for under five bucks if you head to the dollar store.  Lindsay got lucky and found exactly what she needed at Dollar Tree, but I don’t think we have those around here.  Fortunately, if you aren’t averse to destroying tacky Christmas decorations, you can get what you need at 99 Cents Only.

What you need:

My haul from the dollar store.

-A 10″ foam wreath base (aka tacky snowman wreath)
-1 or 2 paperback books (one of these took me all of Pirates of the Caribbean and part of the dictionary…I guess you can’t be picky when it’s 99 cents)
-Brown or grey paint
-Paper towel
-Ribbon piece
-Hot glue gun and LOTS of glue sticks (I went through almost an entire small bag to make one wreath)
-Something to use to press the pages onto the wreath so you don’t burn your fingers
-2 straight pins (optional)

Now put it together:

If you follow the instructions on Living with Lindsay, you’ll be golden.  However, if you buy the 99 Cents Only snowman wreath, there are a couple steps to do before you begin.

1) Rip the snowman off of the wreath.  It’s attached with a stick, so it requires a little finesse to get it off without ruining the wreath.
2) Pull off as much of the fake snow as you possibly can.  You won’t ever see the wreath base, so the looks don’t matter too much, but if you leave the fake snow on, the pages will have a hard time sticking.  Once the snow is gone, get started folding and gluing pages.

Once your wreath is done, you can of course hang it on the wall.  I also placed a simple vase of succulents in the middle and used it as a centerpiece at the dinner table.  Pretty cute.

Happy crafting, kids!

This entry was posted on Sunday, November 8th, 2009 at 10:51 pm and is filed under Craftiness, crafts, diy. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.