Not Another Mini Book?

Well hello again, it's Horace here with you in my natty new top. Do you like it?





That's not really why I decided to blog though. Remember my previous post about recycling paper bags? I thought I'd give you lovely people a tutorial on how I made it. But first, in true Blue Peter Style, here's one I made earlier





We're lucky enough to have a book binding machine, so for this paper bag book I used that and bound each page seperately, as you can see, there is no real cover as such and you can see each addition at the side of the book.





Inside I decorated some of the bag, but left other interesting features exposed. Here I added a pocket for tags or photos by cutting back the original bag.





Depending on how you fold your bags, you can make side or top pockets, or just glue all the openings down and have a conventional style book. The beauty of a paper bag book lies in its versatility.





For my next book, I decided to use one size of bags, and thanks to Tesco delivering their fruit and veg in paper bags, I had a plentiful supply. I cut the handles from each bag.





Then used a bone folder to produce a neat crease down the middle of the bags.





In my paper bag stash, I had a Build a Bear bag, with these fabulous handles on.





I decided to use these in my project, so mercilessly chopped them off.





I used double sided sticky tape...





Which was rather more sticky than I realised, it took me five minutes to unstick my poor paw from the tape!





Once I released myself, I placed the handles in the folds of the bag and stuck them down.





Voila, the covers of the book.





Luckily I remembered to ensure the handles were placed evenly. Wonky handles are so last season!





The red handles, coupled with the fact that it's twelve weeks until Christmas, inspired me to make a Christmas memories book. So out came lasts year's leftover Christmas papers. Wow, we bought a lot last year!





I began by decorating the covers of my book...





Adding stickers from the paper collection for interest....





I toiled into the small hours by candlelight ( okay I'm exaggerating a little, it was lamplight, but it was still toil!)





I decorated the insides of the book, leaving areas of bag showing, I think this adds to the recycled element of the project.





By folding the bottom of the bag up into the book, I was able to create small pockets, that can hold ATCs, tags or photos. All I needed to do was add a small strip of double sided tape to the edges of the fold, to keep any memorabilia from falling out.





Once I was happy with the placement of my pages,





I sewed them all together, by piercing small holes into the centre of the pages, and using wax thread to secure.





I think my book looks very pretty, and now I just need to wait until December to add my special memories





After all that hard work, I need a rest, so I'm off to catch up with some of my favourite blogs.

Ttfn,

With love from the bears.