Another Box

This is the one made from the flat, narrow glove box, shown below. Be sure to click it for a larger view. I actually think I like the paper without the glaze, but the glaze makes the book cover more durable.

This is one for boys, made with a gift bag saved from long ago. He chose the stickers for it, and I outlined the stickers with strips of glitter paper. It is tied with straw rafia through punched holes. Save yourself this trouble and just make two holes or staple it. Paper bag material is hard to punch. The inside pages are made with plain paper bag material. Inside, there will be a little folded piece from the paper bag. Put two pages on one side of it and two pages on the other side. Click on for a larger view.

Outline a book on the folded edge of the bag, and cut it out.



Four boys books. Click on for a larger view.Two on the upper left are made from a used calendar picture, cut in half, folded, and tied with string to look like fisherman's net string. The lower one is covered with the side of the Yorkshire Gold tea box, with a scene of a cricket game in the background. It is glued onto another piece of brown paper bag and the edges are clipped for a fringe. The book is made of brown paper bag and tied with a gold shoelace.



This is how I anchor all the pasted pieces to make them stick.

Make holes equal distance by punching from the ends as far as the puncher will go. Put your filler papers inside and punch through the hole, to make them fit.

Here is my latest box from a pair of pink rubber gloves. I liked this box because it had a very narrow spine, which means it will not take very many pieces of paper to fill it up.

The box is cut open on the side, and the other narrow piece discarded. The holes are punched on the front of the cover, this time, instead of on the spine.

Several sheets of paper are folded in half, cut to size (slightly smaller than the cover) , then folded in half and holes punched just like the cover.
Hold the edges of the book down, by placing clothespins on it for several hours after you have finished the book, to keep the covers from falling open.

After threading the ribbon or string from the back cover, through the pages, to the front cover, open the book up as far as it will go and give the ribbon some space. Do not tie the front until you have done this, or the pages will not turn properly.

Here is what the ribbon looks like threaded through the back cover.

This is covered with a paper from the Carol Wilson designs. Carol Wilson is the one that publishes all those lovely raised-embossed cards and stationery. Cut the paper a little larger than the book. Fold the paper around the folded book jacket, rather than pasting it on flat. It makes it have a little more "give" when opening and closing the book. Everyone has to tinker with their project to find out how it works for them. Then fold some edges of the paper over to the inside. Here are added end-papers in the same color as the pages, with an oval piece glued on, to give it a finished look.

The back inside cover with a clipping from a magazine. Since I do not know what will be done with this book, its pages are blank. Used calendars, themed gift wrap, or special scrapbook pages, make nice covers for books for boys.

The papers are nice on their own, so I didn't want to put to many embellishments on it. I did glaze over the cover with craft glitter paint. Two strips from glitter paper were added by cutting with shaped scissors. All gluing and folding is held together during this project, with clothespins until it dries.When gluing or adding paint or glaze or glitter glue to any paper/cardboard project, it will look wrinkled, but as it dries, it settles down nice and flat.

Two ribbon roses are placed over two roses ont he paper and glued down. A gift tag is made with a small scrap of the paper. The ribbon is finally tied on the outside. I prefer wired ribbons because they stay in the shape in which they are placed.

This is just another example of something that can be done with a box that usually ends up in the trash. These are what I called "homestead crafts" because they were similar to things we did in homestead days. It is a way of providing a creative project for children by looking around and seeing what you have. In those days, all we had was tinfoil, catalog pages, boxes, home made paste, string, pieces of fabric, plain scissors, wax paper and maybe a few other things, but we used our imagination and were able to do quite a bit.