How to Make Your Own Hallow Book Box

For the longest time I've wanted to make a hollow book and over the weekend I finally had the chance. One book saved from the garbage and two X-acto knives letter...

  ♪ Hummm... which one's not like the other? ♬

This has been one of those projects where the materials needed are tricky to find. Every time a good candidate popped up I'd end up reading it and sticking it on the shelf or passing it on to someone else. This time a book with a lovely cover but stained, lumpy pages finally made it's way into my hands. The rest was just a good bit of elbow grease and patience.

Here's what you'll need to do it too:

• A book with a hard cover and at lest 300 or more pages
• X-acto knife
• Glue
• A brick, iron or something heavy to use as a paper weight
• Pencil
• A screw and screw driver or a drill

Let's go through the steps:

Applying a second coating of glue to the outside of pages.

First you'll want to leave a few of the leaves and front matter of the book free as we'll be using them later on. The rest of the pages need to be glued together into a block. To do this I held the pages together and liberally slathered on Elmer's glue. Two coats did the trick. In between drying's, I weighed the book down.




Then I traced around a box with a pencil to form the guide I would be using to cut out the inner chamber of the book. The Norm Abrams holes in the corners make it much easier to very carefully cut out the corners with the X-acto knife.

We're almost there!

After cutting out the pages and cleaning things up a bit in the corners the nest step is to glue down a couple of those pages we left out. This cleans things up slightly. Using the X-acto knife once again, out out the center of the pages and you're done!





For more gift wrap ideas and tutorials be sure to visit the wrapping room over here.



Image: MAM and Magda K. for Gave That