Some girlfriends and I got together to make decorations, and of course we wanted to use book pages to make most of the decor. We offset the muted book colors with a few brightly-colored tissue paper poofs, and I can’t wait to hang them up for Bonnie’s shower! On top of the decorations, we’re also doing a book-themed activity: making their baby his first alphabet book! To create that project, we just put paper with all of the letters into a bowl, so folks could choose their letters, and we’d make sure to have no repeats and get the whole alphabet done. Then, for each page, folks create a collage for their letter. At the end, we will either laminate and bind the pages or scan them and have them printed into a photo book. It’s going to be so cute! It took the four of us just a couple of hours to whip up the decorations for the party, and they were pretty simple to make. Got some old books in your stash?
Book Page Poofs
Making poofs out of heavier paper, like book pages, is a little bit trickier than the tissue paper variety. Book pages aren’t quite as malleable as tissue paper, so I’d choose books with the thinnest pages possible. Book pages are also more brittle than tissue paper, so you want to work carefully when you unfold. Instead of pulling the petals apart, you kind of want to work your fingers between the folds and push them to avoid tearing the pages. You’ll probably still have a few tears, but that adds to the rustic look! Materials
an old book – we used an old calculus text book scissors jewelry wire and a wire cutter embroidery thread
Directions
- Fold your paper into an accordion, using 1 1/2″ folds. You’re basically using the Martha method to create these poofs.
- Twist your wire around the center of your folded piece of paper, and make a loop with the wire, which you’ll use to hang it later. Unlike the Martha poofs, the book page ones we made looked better when we didn’t trim the edges at all.
- Ever so gently push the petals apart. Like I mentioned above, you don’t want to pull like you would with regular poofs, because your pages will tear. Just gently push them apart until you have a nice, poofy decoration.
- Find that metal loop you made and tie the embroidery thread to it, so you can hang!
Book Page Bunting
To create this bunting, we used my glue-free book page bunting method. The only difference was that instead of circles, we made a triangle template and we made them much, much bigger. This one is pretty self-explanatory, but for posterity, here’s how we did it: Materials
old book with large pages cardboard cutout of a triangle, to use as a template hole punch embroidery thread
Directions
- Trace and cut as many triangles as you like from your book pages.
- String your triangles onto the embroidery thread, leaving about 6″ tails on either end, so you can hang your bunting. Ta-DA!
