Weddingbee Blog

As much as I loved the mossy teacup idea, the book ring holder won out. It tied into the stacked book centerpieces so perfectly and that detail was hard to resist. I’m also trying to keep the ultra-girlie-ness on a leash, since this wedding is for both of us and keeping the mister’s preferences in mind helps me with that.

I started out by using a small book from a used bookstore—Mr. Crepe found this little one and the cover was just so incredibly pretty.

I drew the measurements on the endpaper. Keeping it clamped with the binder clip helped for a bunch of pages but after a while it got tough to keep them all straight so I took it off and used the pages that were already cut as a guide. This was the part where it got pretty tedious and I may or may not have whined. A lot.

After I cut about .75″ to 1″ down, I put the binder clip back on to keep the text block together and painted the sides with Sobo craft glue. I let that dry a few hours before un-clipping it.

I took a piece of thick wool felt to cushion the bottom of the hollowed out book. After folding it in half, I cut two tiny slits in the felt to thread a skinny piece of lace through. This I stuck in there with a touch of hot glue and the inside part was done!

Mr. Crepe felt like it was important for the book title to be covered up because he felt that people who saw it would wonder why we used this particular book and I agreed. I was already planning on gold leafing the edges of the book so this just meant more playing with sheets of gold! On it, boss.

This probably wasn’t the best way to do this but I didn’t want to buy MORE craft supplies in addition to all the stuff I already have around the house. So I used a paintbrush and watered down the Sobo glue a tiny bit. Once the glue was slightly thinned, I painted the area that I wanted to gild, waited a second to let it get tacky and then laid some gold on it. I used my fingers to gently pat it down and kept layering the gold in this way until the whole area was covered up. After it had dried, I burnished the gold by rubbing it with the handle of the paintbrush to press it all in.

Working with gold leaf like this was really fun and it’s a forgiving material—if I was impatient and tried to mess with it before the glue dried, the gold would come off and stick to my fingers but that was easily fixed by putting down another layer of glue and gold.

My method was a little haphazard and the result wasn’t perfect, but the fact that you could see all the handmade touches in the crackling gold made me love this little book even more! I also found that the book wouldn’t close properly so I tied it up with some metallic thread for now.

I was thinking that once we decide on our ceremony readings, we could put one of them in here for posterity. It might be nice to find it on our bookshelf, years later, and remember a moment from our wedding day. I’ve also thought of leaving it blank so that we could pass this book on to someone else who might need a holder for their wedding (if it’s not too quirky for them).

What did you end up doing with your ring holder after the wedding?