Creative Word Play

If you have gotten to know me, you know one of my passions is reading. I can sit all day with a cup of coffee and a good book and be perfectly content. I inhale books. Getting the Kindle was fantastic as our bookshelves were overflowing. I also love quotes. This weekend, I decided to get a little creative along this theme. This first idea started after having brunch with a friend on Saturday morning. Afterwards, I was wandering around the nearby shops, and walked past The Paper Source and just had to go in. I used The Paper Source quite extensively for our placecards, ceremony programs, table numbers, etc. for our wedding almost two years ago. I love this store. Something about it just makes me super happy. Anyway, I stumbled across a paper flower making kit that I decided I needed to try. I decided to modify it from its original white paper roses though.

More on this later. Of course, I also had to get more paper and other such items. All of these played into my weekend updates.

First, the quickest update. I needed to fix one of my dry erase boards that I had discussed in a previous post (made out of picture frames). The problem being the background color making my text too hard to read as shown below.

I found new paper at The Paper Source that works much better for this application. I still love the other paper so I am saving it for a future project at some point. But here is the new dry erase board. Much better, huh?

Next, I hung the frames that I had gotten from Pottery Barn (they were 20% off). In one of the frames, I finally framed a picture that was taken by one of J's family members at our wedding (I believe his father's cousin but I am not 100% on this). I really loved the picture, I just hadn't had a place for it until now. But now, it is hanging in my office / our sitting room. I also used the other two PB frames for quotes. I figure that I can switch out the quotes by printing on the different colored paper I bought. Yay for more decorations in the sitting room!

And finally on to the flowers!

I decided to do about half the flowers with the white paper provided in the kit and half using book pages. At this point, I ran into a dilemma. I was okay with cutting apart one of the books I did not like, but I didn't want to necessarily display that text as a reminder of a book I didn't care for. But at the same time, I couldn't cut pages out of a book I loved because it felt like I would be murdering the book. So, I came up with a solution. I knew that I could read books through the Kindle app on my computer (or now through "the cloud"), so I figured, I should be able to print pages of books I had on my Kindle to paper and use that. It was actually slightly more complex that that. The Kindle app does not let you actually print the pages from what you are reading (which I was actually expecting before I even tried it). But print screen solved this problem pretty quickly. A quick copy and paste and I was on my way. So, what book did I choose? After looking at my choices of books I had read, I decided on The Lord of the Rings (btw - J's reaction: "Could you be any nerdier?"). I was very close to choosing The Chronicles of Narnia, but decided against it. I would have definitely chosen Mere Christianity if it was on my Kindle, but I actually have the paperback to that one.

Basically, the idea behind these flowers was to roll the paper cutout into a rose shape and then hot glue the end of it in place.

For the book ones, I traced the pattern onto my paper with pencil.

By the way, does anyone else remember making these spiral things in school? I had a flashback to elementary school art class.

For the leaves, they were pre-cut in my kit (but would be easy to make without the kit) and I hot glued the leaves to the ends of the provided wires. Each rose got 5 leaves that were wound together with the green sticky tape that is often used for this sort of thing.

Then the rose was hot glued to the center of the bent back leaves.

I made 9 roses and put them in one of my Mason Jars I have lying around. I used the remaining book paper by shredding it and putting it as filler in the bottom of the jar.

And now, a final look at my desk with these recent updates.

Speaking of reading, though, I need to read about 10 books for the class I am auditing this fall! (And according to my Kindle, I am only 22% done the first one). I'm going to work on that right now. Happy reading!