Using Used Books Part II

So on monday I covered quite a few ways to get your hands on used books. I had an oversite though, book swaps!

Here is a list of the book swaps I rustled up:

Book Mooch ++ Bookins ++ WhatsOnMyBookshelf ++ Title Trader ++ Read it Swap it (uk) ++ Readers United ++ Swap Club (New Zealand) ++ Boeken Ruilen (Netherlands) ++ Book Swapper (Germany) ++ Frugal Reader ++ Paperback Swap ++ And on the topic of swaps, if you haven’t visited Leah Peah’s Craft Swap, you should go check that out too!

And another thing that I forgot about was to mention a great way to keep track of your books, go check out Library Thing for all your library keeping track of needs, it’s kind of like the Ravelry for books. You can check out my Library here (it’s not the complete library, but a bit of it) There is another similar site, but I can’t remember the name of it (Carolyn (or Trixy), that one Trixy told you about, what was it called?)

Here is a bundle of used encyclopedia I found at a garage sale last weekend.

Anyway, that’s the catch up. So on to the main theme, Using Used Books!

I have always liked this tutorial since I found it. It’s about moleskin journals, but I think that you could pretty much use it to refill any book with new pages to use as a journal or a sketch book. It describes binding really well with clear pictures and instructions.

You can Rebind a book you love with a hard back book you don’t care for so much. Use the same method they do here, but just skip the part about making your own hardback for it, just use a book stripped of its pages (using the tutorial above for that part).

And if you have problems removing the pages cleanly, you can check this tutorial for how to cleanly remove pages from a book.

Now you can just go ahead and remove some pages and use them for working into collages, scrap book pages, and other odd such bits like that. The sting method (which I just accidentally spelled stink method, hehe) would work great for getting pages out of a book. Making book marks from old book covers would be another good idea.

I found a ton of tutorials on Instructables about making secret compartment books of one form or another, these were my favorites:
Audio Book
Sexy Secret Book
Ipod Book

And then if you need some book ends, you could give this a shot and make yourself some Book Bookends.

Or if you cd/dvd collection is as out of hand as the book collection, you could make a book into a holder for them.

Well, that concludes my bookish ideas on the subject for now. I’ll be trying out some of the above tutorials and I’ll make sure to let you know how they turn out.

I’ll be posting some more things on ebay tomorrow as well as updating the shop this friday, so make sure to check those out. Thank you to everyone who has bid on my ebay auctions and placed orders through the shop, you are really what keeps Craft Leftovers up and running and my bills paid and food on the table. I appreciate you all so much!

Have a great Hump day!

++ Kristin ++