How To Upcycle a Vintage Book Into A Christmas Card Display

Expect Christmas cards to begin filling your postbox soon.
Here’s how to upcycle an old book to display your Holiday mail.

If you’re like me, you have a few old books around that will never actually be read, but can not be thrown away.

Ever.

Because old books are treasures, and even if they’re not my style of reading, their age makes them keepers.

Luckily, they can be used as decor instead of wasting away in dark closets. Books provide serious style when displayed in vignettes on tables and dressers and shelves.  You can tie them with string, cover them in burlap and manipulate your vintage tomes in other innovative ways to show them off.

Our project today saves yet another book from donation, and provides Christmas decor at the same time.

How to Upcycle an Old Book into a Christmas card display:

What you’ll need:

Pick out an unused yet intact old hardcover book. I wanted a red book with gilt edges, but the best I came up with was a blue book with red gilt on the top edges of the pages only.  The sides of the pages don’t show, and I can position it strategically with the red showing when I’m displaying it.  I painted the wrapped edges of the book cover with two coats of gold paint to look festive, as shown here:

Fold the Pages:

Fold all the pages in half, tucking the long edges in close to the binding. This creates the slots to tuck the greeting cards in for display.

I chose to leave the last two pages on each side without hard creases, because I love the maps on the inside covers.  If your book doesn’t have an attractive inner cover, you can cover it with scrapbook paper or wrapping paper.

Decorate The Book Card Display

You can stop at this point, and use the book as is for your card display.

I thought I’d take it a step further and give it some Christmas pizzazz.

I guess I’m a wimp, but I couldn’t glue the Holiday stuff on top of the beautiful maps on the inner covers.  I grabbed a piece of card stock, 3″ x 4.5″ and stuck the decorations onto that.

I used:

1. 1.5″ x 6″ red velvet ribbon from my stash.
2. Wrap thin craft wire around a pencil five times, cut it, slipped it off, then carefully fold the ribbon and slide it through the roll. I flattened all the rings one way.
3. Form another piece of craft wire into three coils, each a little bigger than the other. Mine are from 1.5″ to 2″ in diameter. And this is my mistake: I have silver wire instead of gold, which would better match the edges of my book.
4. Cut greenery with dies. I used Sissix thinlits Tim Holtz mini Holiday Greens. On the package, one of the designs shows up in red, and looks like berries on a branch. I cut two of them from white pearl card stock.  The sandwich I used in my Cuttlebug was the A plate, a piece of mat board, the rubber mat, B plate, die, card stock, then topped with another B plate.  For the berries and metallic card stock I didn’t need that piece of mat board. Be sure to flip your top B plate after each cut so it doesn’t warp.
5. Glue greenery pieces near one narrow end of the 3″ x 6″ piece of card.  Adhere the wire coils and wire-wrapped ribbon.  The white berry branches are glued on top of the wire coils.

 Now your Old Book is ready for the holiday cards!

It’s still almost a month until Christmas, so we don’t have very many cards to display yet. Unfortunately, when you have the pages tucked full you can’t see all the pretty card’s fronts. However, you can gaze on the fanned burst of color and feel the Christmas spirit!