Weddingbee Blog

After I’d had the revelation of being able to use book pages as decor, Cinnamon Buns said he had an idea he wanted to try. We went to home Home Depot, and he looked at mysterious things like small lightbulbs and power cords and wires. He is a lighting technician, so this is fairly normal. I wasn’t sure why he was measuring them, though, and muttering about size and watts. When we got home, he pulled up this instructable on how to make a lamp out of a fanned-open book!

Source

Um, awesome? He’d found this tutorial who knows when and thought about making one. He’d even saved a few books that his work was going to get rid of (they were cleaning out props storage—we got our coffee table from a similar clear out, too!) so he could try it out. The next day, he came home from work with a drilled and cut book. He’d threaded some thin rope through the holes, so we then spent a little while trying to fan out the pages. Now, this was the first attempt, so there was an extra hole drilled (bit was too big), and the holes were not entirely straight. Lesson: clamp the book before drilling. Not having the two holes parallel made it a bit awkward to get a nice fan, as did the fact that we had to adjust every little page to where we wanted it. The tutorial shows the lamp hanging on a wall, but we wanted to make these into table-top things. Gravity also worked against us, with the pages eventually wanting to sag. I was also not a fan of the black cord running through the pages. I wanted a better illusion—the illusion of a book perfectly fanned out, glowing from the middle, not sagging—and something that could hopefully be made ahead of time.

We talked about all sorts of cunning ways to achieve this. My favourite solution was dipping an entire book in a glue/water bath, arranging it, and letting it dry. We also talked about painting the edges with glue, using crafty wire or even craftier string, and all sorts of other harebrained schemes.

We decided to try arranging the pages as best we could on the strings threaded through the book, then painting them with a wrinkle-free paper glue I have for my card making. The idea was that once the glue dried, we could pull out the strings and hopefully the book would be there—almost frozen in time.

Well, we tried.

Not quite the look I was going for. You can see one of the strings pulled halfway out in the photo. Ooh, and check out that visible glue!

Nothing screams “HOMEMADE” in the worst way possible like visible glue strings like that. Our next step was the glue-dip. We didn’t have an appropriate container lying around, so we put it off for a bit. Then, in that waiting-to-go-back-to-Home-Depot time, I found this wedding on Offbeat Bride, proving that nothing is original anymore.

OMG HOW DID THEY GET THAT BOOK TO DO THAT?!

Once I calmed down, I tried to analyze what I could see in the photo. There was definitely something going on around the middle of the pages—you can see a half-circle there. I was imagining either wire or something crafty done with flexible clear plastic, like projector transparency sheets. I couldn’t figure it out, so I decided to go to the bride’s Flickr stream to contact her and ask what magic she worked on that book. And there, in the comments on this photo, she’d already explained it to someone else. You fold every other page in half. What? No glue bath? No cunning wire form? NO BLACK STRING?

I grabbed a book from our wedding-book pile* and went at it. Twenty minutes later, I had this:

No supplies needed other than the book, no drying time, and no mess to clean up, either.

We haven’t cut the hole into the spine of any of our folded books yet, but Cinnamon Buns has some ideas about cool stuff to do with things I don’t really understand, such as LEDs, tiny lightbulbs, and wire. I think this will be one of his favourite wedding projects: it was his idea in the first place , he gets to use the bandsaw at work and drills, and he gets to show off his knowledge of how electrical things work. While I also learned my share about those things at school, he’s actually kept up with the knowledge.

Can I just take this moment to brag about what well-rounded people theatre schools turn out? He did a two-year program, and I did a four-year degree program, and we both learned so much practical, life-applicable stuff, such as how to hand sew, use a sewing machine, effectively iron, draft ground plans and elevations, use power tools, use big tools like table saws, and basic electrical theory. We both retained different amounts of it, though, so he is both the power tool and sewing machine operator in the house, and I…um…can use a scale ruler, set up an awesome binder, and play Name That Opera?

Did anything you wanted to do for your wedding turn out much simpler than you’d imagined?

*I went to the library on my lunch hour one day to see what they sell hardcovers for: fiction is $0.50, non-fiction $1. But the day I went, they were having a two-for-one sale. I couldn’t pass up $0.25 each for hardcovers that had already been well loved, so I bought a lot. Two dollars is a lot of books at that price! I bought $2.50 worth the next day and got my workout riding my bike home on both days!