Altered Book Christmas Trees

Who's ready to get their Christmas book craft on?  Now here's when you pipe in with, "I do, I do!"

This is an easy tutorial, and the end result is so cute.  I set up a display on the front desk of the library where I work with the finished trees and it looks adorable.  Bookish and festive!

I'll go through the step by step of what I did, which was based on the instructions I found here.

It's one of those projects you can work on while you're watching t.v. - You fall in to the repetition of folding the pages and before you know it, you're finished.

You'll need a few old books that you don't mind re purposing, an exacto knife, dry adhesive, and any accessories you'd like to use to decorate the trees.   I like to use books that are older and have yellowing pages because of the antique-y effect it gives to the finished tree.

Here are the steps:

Step 1
Remove the front and back covers from the book

Step 2
Count out 30 pages, and carefully slice down the binding to separate the pages from the rest of the book

Step 3
Count out another 30 pages, and slice down the binding again. 

Step 4
With the binding an the left, fold down the top right side of the page into a triangle

Step 5
Fold the page down toward the binding a second time, sort of like you're making a paper airplane

Did I mention I used a very old children's book for my trees?  Nice werewolf picture, right?

Step 6
Fold the little triangle at the bottom of the page up.

Continue folding all of the pages in this way until you've folded all of them, and you have half of a tree.

Once you've folded all of the pages in both 30 page sets, thoroughly coat the back of one of the tree halves with dry adhesive, and affix the two tree halves together.

I decorated the tree with crafting supplies I had on hand, and my final result looked like this:

Like I said earlier, I set up a cute little display for the Christmas season on the front desk at the library where I work, and I think it's too damn cute:

How fun for folks to walk in the front door and have these festive altered books greet them.

Merry Christmas, and happy book crafting if you give this one a go!

Ta-ta for now.