altering a (giant) book

this past weekend i attended the wedding of a friend from honeyrock. to say that she and her husband love books would be an understatement. their wedding invitation was a wonderfully unique "book" complete with a library book pocket and due date card. the program at the ceremony was also a book; complete with copyright information for their love story.

so as stephanie and i were thinking of something creative to give them we had the idea to make them a book. originally it was going to be a scrapbook filled with marriage advice from all of our honeyrock friends from around the country (and world!). we sent out an email asking for people to send 8x8 pages or email advice. at some point (i think the day before the wedding) i saw a link to this tutorial to create a binder from an old book. PERFECT! what better to give this couple than a book of their own? one they could put on the shelf with all their other books. but that left me with less than 24 hours (and less than 12 hours until stephanie's flight got in) to find an awesome book and figure out how to make it into a binder then insert all the pages. 

so i took an extended lunch break and headed to goodwill & the local thrift store to try to find a book that would accommodate a binder spine. the tutorial told me to use a 3x5 card binder spine, but i knew that wouldn't hold the pages people sent. at goodwill i found a book about birds that i thought might work so i coughed up the $1.79 for it (plus a few old reader's digest volumes to turn into purses). then i decided to check out twice as nice and there i hit the jackpot. 

seriously. JACKPOT. this dictionary is from 1966. normally $1.50. had a blue dot. thus 50% off. total price for greatest book ever : 75 cents!!!

this baby is going to be helping me make projects for years to come! but back to this project. i removed all the pages from the book (and saved them for future fun) and followed the directions from the tutorial to cover the spine with the endpapers. the columns of fantastic useful information about indo-european languages and metric conversions fit perfectly in the spine. 

 

next i found a binder spine from an old winnie the pooh photo album that contained photos from junior high and my wonderful husband drilled some holes & attached the binder piece to the spine. the tutorial suggests attaching it to the back page, but i wanted it in the middle so to the spine it went. then i went to fetch stephanie from the airport. we returned, poured ourselves some wine and happy creative chaos ensued.

paper and dictionary pages were everywhere for hours! sorry for the terrible photo- it was very late and very dark. some of the pages were just simple, others were exactly what people sent and others were a decoupaged mass of words and photos. we found specific words in the dictionary: melissa, david, wedding, marriage, love, etc. we tore up pages randomly. we stayed up cutting and gluing and crafting until we couldn't sit up anymore. saturday morning we packed ourselves up for the drive to milwaukee. after some last minute additions to the book it was finished!

a wonderful wedding present full of pictures, memories and words of love and advice from people all over the world. this was one of the most exciting and crazy projects i've ever completed. i loved it and as soon as i find myself another giant dictionary i'll be altering another book!