Merry Christmas or as we say in Hawai'i, Mele Kalikimaka! It's our favorite time of year and as a newly formed book publishing company, we decided to celebrate with a book tree! We searched high and low for book ornaments, but none of them were what we were envisioning, they were all teeny tiny and we have a very large tree. So I took it upon myself to DIY our ornaments and I am so happy with the finished product!
If you'd like to make your own book ornaments, here's a step by step guide:
1. Choose your favorite books! Make a list and ask your friends or fam for their faves, my kiddos picked out a bunch of books that they love too so we have a variety of books from all types of genres and reading levels.
2. Find mini composition books. I scoured the internet for the best price, but there are a number of places and brands to choose from. I opted for the Feela 70 pack on Amazon.
3. Either scan in your books or find pictures of the front and back covers online. If you can't find the back cover you can print out 2 front covers. Size them to 3.25"x4.6" or whatever size your mini composition books are.
4. Print and cut the covers out leaving a 1" space around each side. I found the best way to apply the covers is to use a folding technique so that there's no glue marks or crooked lines. I cut the corners on each side too, which made the folding easier and then I used Elmer's glue to glue the covers to the inside. The folding process almost reminded me of when we were kids and used to make book covers for our text books lol. Not sure if they still do that now. (Note: Most of the novels we used were rectangle shaped, but may of the children's books were square shaped so I used a paper cutter to cut the mini composition books, you could probably also use a heavy duty scissors.)
5. Once both the front and back covers are in place you will need gold thread or twine or whatever color you'd like and a glue gun. We opted for gold ornament thread since our other Christmas ornaments were only gold or white themed, that way the books were what added color and made it pop. Cut the thread to about 5-6", make a loop and tie a knot at the bottom, this is to hang the book. Then find the middle of the book and hot glue the thread about 2" down from the top of the page.
6. We made about 90 books and covered our tree, some of our favorite titles were, A Discovery of Witches, Ender's Game, The Count of Monte Cristo and Harry Potter 1 and 4. We of course had to add some of Seastars Publishing's books like The Tiny Seed and The Witches Three (coming soon).
We are so stoked with how our tree came out this year! Our plan is to add more books every year. Another fun idea would be to write your favorite quotes from each book inside the mini composition books, in case your guests are looking for a good read, they can go through your tree picks. Note: We will also be participating in our first Jolabokaflod Icelandic holiday this year, come back to learn more about what it is and how it went!
Check out our video HERE.