All The More Reason You Can't Judge a Book By It's Cover

It certainly doesn't have to be a best seller to make a beautiful wreath!

Heather and I both work for a small book publicity firm, so it was a no brainer when we were both completely enamored with making a book page wreath.

Swoon! Love at First Sight... This ravishing wreath is the one Kim over at Starshine Chic whipped up.

While we heart books, we had no remorse about using one to further our craftiness.

A trip to Michaels was most definitely in order because as newbies we owned none of the essentials for this project : (

After scoring distress ink and a scallop punch on sale (this turned my frown upside down) it was high time to get cracking on this “little” project.

I started ripping the pages out of the entire, read entire (sigh!), book and punching the scallops out.

Next came our first foray into the world of distress ink. At first it seemed a travesty to take these perfect scallops and dirty them up by smudging ink all over them. Our inner perfectionist reigned in the beginning by using a brush to precisely distress each little beauty. This was quickly ditched for a paper towel and hurried dabbles. Didn’t seem to make much of a difference, so save yourself some time and sanity!

Once a stash of scallops was surmised, Heather started sticking these little suckers on the straw wreath form. We headed the advice of the trusty bloggers before us and used a pencil eraser to expedite the process. The process is simple enough—stick the scallop on the eraser end of a pencil, dab a bit of hot glue and stick it to the wreath form.

 We can do it!

The tricky part is having enough stamina to even cover an 8 inch wreath! We consider ourselves pretty persistent if nothing else but this project almost beat us. We kept on punching, distressing, glueing and placing into the wee hours of Saturday morning. The fruit of our labor was very rewarding but there was only one wreath and two copy cats. Sad!

I like you, I think you can stay awhile

The entire time we kept saying I think I can, I think I can. You can too, but we’re not trying to fool any one with the “easiness” of this project.

Copy Cat Run Down:

Total Cost: Distress Ink: $5 Book: Free Scallop Punch: $5 Straw Wreath Form: $3. Total of $13, but we like to consider the scallop punch an investment : )

Total Time: As I said above, I punched and distressed the scallops while Heather glued the scallops on the wreath. We tag teamed on this project and it still took 6-ish hours for an 8 inch wreath. We were more than forewarned about the length of this project but were still surprised (and exhausted) by this beauty.

Would we do this craft again? Maybe if we found a way to create an extra day each week. We’re definitely in awe of this wreath, but it was very time intensive. We would definitely not advise this for a solo copy cat. We’re convinced we would have never finished without each other! If we do give it another go, we thought using one of Addie’s favorite children’s books would be super cute (and sentimental)!

Credit: There are tons but we liked this one best!