(a new kind of) literary love. or sacrilege. depending on your perspective.

seems every corner i turned this past fall, someone was crafting beauty from recycled book pages. the book wreath, for instance. sublime.

i decided to get in on the fun, and purchased a hefty tome from the discard shelf at my local library. (sidenote: apparently mr library guy harbors a secret crush on me; i kept trying to pay a quarter for my hardcover, per the pricing on the sign, and he insisted the book was just twenty cents. so whaddayaknow, i scored a nickel. it's not a very big crush.)

my literary selection: DOUBLE EAGLE, published in 1979. from the flap copy: Double Eagle is the riveting, true account of the first flight across the Atlantic Ocean by men in a balloon.

i picked the book partly for the heft of the pages, and partly because i felt little remorse splitting its spine. i mean, a balloon crossing. who cares, right? except i started to read an extracted page and actually found it, well, riveting.

but let us move on from the magnitude of my nerdiness to better things. things with a point.

i turned this homely fellow:




into these guys:




and this:




and also these:




groovy, eh? and lest you think i am Brimming With Great Ideas, i assure you that i am actually just good at mimicking other people's ideas. so. gift bag tutorial here. purchase a (much more gorgeous than mine) bird mobile here. can't find the gal who used to craft hair flowers, but i originally saw them on etsy. (and nope, i am not selling them, i just placed them on a card for elle.)

go forth and craft something, but a word of advice: lock up your austen or rowling or rice (or whatever earns the pulitzer in your universe), because crafting with pages is addicting in the worst way. not even my tolkien is safe. (ok, well, probably tolkien. but little else. beware.)