In my quest to produce more homemade gifts last holiday season, I jumped at the opportunity to make something I myself had always wanted: a hidden storage book. Who doesn’t want a big important-looking book to hide away secret treasures?
I set out to make three books: one for my little brother and two for my sisters-in-law. Following the Secret Hollow Book tutorial from How To Do Stuff, I hit my local Goodwill for the three thickest novels I could find. Next, Dale and I took turns using an Exacto knife to slice out pages. This step is not for the faint of heart: it took a long time and resulted in one cut finger and many, many tiny bits of paper scrap. As you can see from the images, we never produced a perfectly clean edge. Because the books were so thick, the pages stacked differently depending on how the book was held. Nevertheless, the resulting rustic look was pretty cool.
While the cutting was tedious, the rest was simple. After painting a water and glue solution to bind the pages together, I just used stacks of books to help everything dry. Lastly, I filled the books with little goodies: jewelry, soap, gift cards.
Part of the fun was picking which page the secret storage compartment faced. This book happened to be a bit naughty, and I thought it was hilarious to have it open to a particularly steamy passage. Avert your eyes from the words on the page if desired.
February 25, 2013 10:11 pm
How cool! Thanks for the heads-up, though, that we might need to shed a little blood over this project. Still…I think it’d totally be worth it.
February 26, 2013 1:00 pm
Now that I think about it, the best craft projects tend to involve a bit of blood, sweat, or tears. Well, hopefully only tears of joy. (Though I can definitely think of some projects that involved the other kind…)