Advent Challenge: Day 8 – Book Page Tree

Day 8: Book Page Trees

I’ve made loads of these this year! Great for making bulk lots of cards as they are quick, easy and cheap to make, and can easily be made unique, or even tailored to your recipient!

This year I’ve seen a few people using book pages in their craft – mainly on ATCs – and I’ve had a go at a few myself. Although to start with I did have problems with the mere fact that I had to destroy a book in order to use its pages! I’ve found that I am more mentally capable of such a dreadful crime (!) if the book book is old and tatty anyway. So I bought an old art book from a charity shop, and carefully took it apart so I could use it in my craft. I’ve used the picture pages to make some gorgeous handmade envelopes, and the written pages to use on these Christmas cards.

To make these cards:

• Tear a page from an old book into rough Christmas tree shaped triangles.
• Use green chalks to colour the trees, particularly highlighting the torn edges.
• Glue the tree to the centre of a white square card blank
• Draw a short trunk at the bottom of the tree using a brown marker pen
• Decorate the tree!

There is so much scope for decorating the trees individually. In the two examples here I’ve used adhesive pearls for baubles in one, and glitter glue for tinsel in the other. I’ve also used adhesive gems, brads, peel-off borders (which can also be coloured with permanent markers), and fibres. You can tailor a card to your recipient’s favourite colour very easily if you want too. At the top of the tree I’ve used star-shaped gems, but again, you could use pretty much anything that’s starry or sparkly!

You’ll notice that I’ve used my book page with the writing running vertically. This is another example of me being frugal! It’s quite easy to tear a series of diagonal lines down a page and get lots of triangles, but if I had done this with the page horizontal, half of my trees would have had upside-down writing on. I’m sure this wouldn’t bother plenty of people, but for some reason I didn’t like the idea, but could happily tolerate sideways writing – go figure! The result was that I ended up using the entire sheet, and only threw away a tiny border from around each edge. So just one book page (approx A4) has made about a dozen cards, and I still have some left over!

Another variation I have made on this theme is using a piece of sheet music (bought for 20p in a charity shop) in the same way. In this one I’ve used purple fibre as tinsel, and put a purple gem brad in each corner of the card.