Hello From the Front Porch,
Rhonda Merry here, and today I am going to show you
how I altered an old book to make the
"Give Me A Meadow" shadow box
from our latest kit, One Sunny Day.
Here are the tools I used:
(mine were saved from a house fire but were no longer resale quality, just FYI for my librarian friends)
Ruler
Pencil
Craft Knife
Sharp precision tip scissors
Glue stick
The first step was to mark off about a 1inch
border around the first page of your open book.
Using your pencil, draw a line to each mark as
a guide for making your first cut.
Now you have a good guide for cutting.
Next, using your craft knife, carefully cut on the
pencil line through the top layers of the book pages.
Remove cut outs and set aside.
Continue cutting away the center of the pages until you get your desired depth.
(For my book I went about half way in)
The corners get a little tricky. Make sure your get your craft knife close to each side of each corner. This may require turning the book to get a better angle for your cut. If there are still too many tags on your corners, use your precision scissors to snip the tags away for a clean look.
As you get deeper into the book the pages tends to shift. Periodically straighten the spine of the book and align the pages to get an accurate cut.
Save your book pages. They make great background papers for lots of other projects and die cut well for making fun embellishments. This book also had some glossy pages. I tore them completely out since there weren't that many. I will be saving mine for Art Journal projects.
Next, adhere the pages together. I only glued the three open sides. I did this by quickly and randomly flipping the pages and swiping the glue stick to keep the book pages from separating while on display.
I did not do every page and I only glued until the book stayed together while standing.
Don't get too heavy with the glue in this step too. That way you can tuck pieces down into the pages for that great 3-D effect.
Now you're ready to decorate your shadow box with the items from your Front Porch Kit.
For my sample above, I painted the covers of the book along with the edges of the pages. The blue book also needs a little TLC. I will have to work on that one too.
Thanks for stopping by. I hope you will try this on one of your next projects. If you do, be sure to link us in to show it off. I would love to see how you did.
If you are interested in purchasing a "One Sunny Day" kit or would like to see other amazing projects created by our Front Porch Team, visit us at www.frontporchkits.com.
(no library quality books were used in the making of this project.)
Have a great week, stay cool, and Merry Crafting!
Rhonda