Book From a Box

This little box has been made into a book. After it was covered in a plain paper, it was topped with a piece of white glitter-paper, then outlined in glitter glue. If you are working with children,remember, this has a drying period, and you may want to use strips of shiny papers instead. Inside the window-opening, I placed a rose sticker. You can use clippings from seed catalogs for this, or go to a free Victorian floral graphics site and print off your own clip art.

These are some of the boxes I want to work with. I think the window opening could be quite interesting to use on the cover.

These boxes are very narrow and will not require many pages to fill.

Cut off all the folding flaps and open it out to look like a book, like the this.

Then trace around it for the papers to cover it, making it a little larger, so you can fold them over to the inside. To make pages, trace around the box, only make them a little smaller than the box.

Here there are "end" papers made of scrapbook scraps, to place over the edges of the glued paper that was wrapped around the cover.

Punch holes through the binding of the box, and through the pages of the book, and thread a wired ribbon through it, or use string or some other interesting material.

Put the ribbon through the center page, so that it looks like this:

(The pages have a "rose" theme, and will have things about roses written on them, later. It will be used as a gift.

Then tie it into a secure bow on the outside, like this.

To answer the question "Why bother?" --This is a very good question. Why not just chuck it all into the rubbish bin and be done with it? For one thing, being creative is very good for the mind. The Pilgrims thought that idle hands would make mischief, and they were right. If you do not show your children how to make things with practically nothing, their hands will find other things to do that is destructive, instead of constructive. Some people think of "creative" as being a painter or a writer, or something that requires a lot of skill or talent. I wanted to show how you can take little bits of things and use them in a beautiful way. Once a person practices this, they can find more creative ability than they thought they had. Try this project with anything you have on hand and see what you come up with.

If you are interested in the politics behind farming, check out this article:

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source: http://www.indiatogether.org/2003/apr/ivw-vandana.htm Although it was written in 2003, the issue is still important to everyone, especially for students and feminists: check out the article and see what issues are really important in the real world.