What accomplishment are you most proud of?
I have been wanting to write about this for a while now! After the tremendous success of our
book page floor, I decided I wanted to undertake another bookish project. Because I am a book reviewer, I get a lot of Advanced Reader Copies, or ARCs, of books. These are, essentially, proof copies. The usually do not having finished cover art, and they cannot be donated or sold. Basically, they are intended to be trashed. Because I get so many of these for reviewing purposes, they build up quickly, and I hate to just waste them. So, I decided I was going to use them to make Christmas decorations.
In August, I started thinking of ways to make decorations. I covered some styrofoam balls with scraps of book pages. I cut some pages into lines and used them to fill clear glass and plastic bulbs. I used book pages to decoupage paper mache and wooden forms. I shredded book pages and used in floral and burlap arrangements. I made Victorian style floral cones from book pages. And I used an entire book's worth of pages to make a tree skirt. I even made book page chain garland.
The results were more stunning than I ever hoped for. I am completely in love with our literary Christmas Tree.
Because this was not your traditional Christmas tree, I decided to put it up early. It has been up for about a week and a half. The entire thing took about 3 books, again, one of those was entirely used on the tree skirt. To make the skirt, I cut out 2200 circles of various sizes from the pages. I hot glued them in overlapping rows on a cotton batting tree skirt. It took about 7 hours to make the tree skirt.
Often I would work on these decorations while Hubby and I watched television, so I was able to put in a lot of hours without noticing it. Over the course of 3.5 months, I made probably close to 100 ornaments, the chain, and the tree skirt. I used burlap to make small bows for the tree, and the large bow for the tree topper.
Such an unusual tree needs something unusual underneath. Vintage books, a vintage typewriter, a file drawer and card catalog drawer were just the thing.
I am incredibly proud of this tree. I think it turned out so lovely, I am not sure I will ever want to take it down. You can see the full set of pictures of the tree
here.
