These DIY Spell Books are absolutely Creeptastic!
Be sure to watch the full Video Tutorial below!
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You'll need:
Books
Cardboard
School glue (Dollar Tree) $1
Hot glue gun (Wal-Mart)
Hot glue sticks (Wal-Mart)
Assorted mini Halloween creepy crawlies (Dollar Tree) $1
Mod Podge (Dollar Tree) $1
Paper towel or tissue paper (Dollar Tree) $1
Paint brushes
Black paint
Brown craft paint
Gold metallic craft paint
Tea bag
Hot water
To start this project you'll need some books. Although it doesn't matter what
the book is really about, I chose to be a little authentic and used some actual
"witchy" books. You can use whatever old books you have lying around
or you can get some old books at the thrift store.
Two of the books I chose to use are soft covers, but I want them to be hard
covers. So, I'm going to start with turning my soft cover books into hardcover books
by using some cardboard and school glue.
I'm
going to take my cardboard and tuck it inside the front cover of the book, then
with a pencil or marker trace around the edge of the book cover marking where
to cut your cardboard. With your scissors or rotary cutter cut the cardboard to
size. I used a craft roller to flatten out one side of the cardboard that would
be tucked inside along the spine, this step is optional. I then covered one
side of the cardboard with school glue and glued it inside the front cover of
my book; I then repeated this step with the back cover of the book. Set aside
to dry.
Next we're going to take our hot glue gun and we're going to embellish the
covers of our books by using the glue gun for writing and drawing designs, also
to glue on our creepy crawlies. This is where you can get really creative.
After our hot glue has dried we can start working on covering our books. You
can cover them with paper towel, single ply is best. However after trying the
paper towel method, I can definitely say I prefer using the tissue paper.
So to cover our books we're going to take a paintbrush and our Mod Podge and
paint over the cover and everything that we glued on.
We're then going to take
our single ply paper towel (if using paper towel you'll need to dampen it
first) or tissue paper, crumple it up (I personally didn't like the effect of the paper towel so, I ended up only using the tissue paper), then open it back up and gently lay it
down over your Mod Podge cover and pat it down. When using the paper towel
you'll need to use a paintbrush or foam brush to really get into all the nooks
and crannies of your design. With the tissue paper, just pressing firmly with
the palm of your hand seems to be all it took for me. Now we're going to set
our book aside to dry for a couple of hours.
After the Mod Podge on our newly covered book is fully dried, we're going to trim the excess paper towel/tissue paper, however
leaving enough to wrap just inside our covers.
Now we can take our black craft
paint and paint the entire book Black, again set aside to dry.
After the black
paint has fully dried we can then go in with a dry brush and some of our brown
craft paint and stipple the brown paint onto the book to give it an aged look
and /or use our gold metallic paint to dry brush the raised bits of our creepy
crawlies and our hot glue gun designs to add dimension.
Now to finish our cover by folding the extra paper towel/tissue paper over and glue it to the inside of your cover. Then take a plain piece
of paper and cut to size to cover the inside of our covers and glue in place.
Then, set aside to fully dry.
After
our painted books are dry we can move on to the final step to really give our
books an authentic aged and creepy look. For this last step you need a tea bag,
hot water and a paint brush. Steep your tea bag in a small amount of hot water
until the water reaches your desired color. Then dip your paint brush in the
tea and gently bush the edges of your book's pages. This really gives a nice
aged look to your books and in my opinion really completes the overall look and
feel of this project.
Thank you for stopping by and checking out our DIY Halloween Spell Books Tutorial! What did you think of this project? Be sure to let us know in the comments below!
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