Repurposing Books: How to Make a Book Wreath
What do you do with books you don’t want to keep and can’t donate? I use them in my craft projects.
There a handful of reasons a book might not be able to be donated to used bookstores. The two I run into the most often are damage and ARC copies. Books that are missing pages, falling apart, or water damaged are just thrown away at used bookstores. Sometimes they’ll even toss really popular books when they have too many copies of them.
ARC stands for Advanced Reader Copy. These are books that were used for reviews and have not gone through final edits. Sometimes a condition of receiving an ARC copy of a book is that you can’t donate it. Publishers and authors might worry that someone will mistake the unfinished ARC as the finished book and leave bad reviews. Similarly authors get proof copies of their books from printers to make sure the formatting is correct. These are also not donatable.
Instead of throwing away books like this, you can use them to create book-themed art, decorations, and more. I started this in 2020 when I thought I’d get to have a book release party for When Magic Calls: A Collection of Modern Fairy Tales. I made hundreds of gold stars out of damaged books and strung them for decorations. I still have them and will eventually have a book party with them.
After seeing BookToker Lady Fallon Willoughby teaching people how to make book wreaths, I decided to give it a try. I love color, so the first thing I did was a wash of paint to color the pages and still show the text. Now I’ve written down the steps and included her original video so you can repurpose your books and make your own book wreath.
How to Make a Book Wreath
Supplies
books/book pages
metal wreath base
hot glue gun & hot glue
paint & brushes
scissors
star hole puncher
wire
ruler
Making Your Pieces & Assembling Your Wreath
Tear out book pages. I used about 50 pages.
Cut the pages to shape. I used about 5 pages to cut out stars. 15 were large rectangles. 15 about half an inch smaller, and 15 another half inch smaller.
Paint your shapes. I used water-down gold and three shades of water-down metallic blue.
Roll squares into cones and glue in that shape.
Take the larger cones and wrap the tips around the outer most edge of the wreath. Glue in place.
Wrap the tips of the medium cones around the middle wreath wire and glue.
Wrap the tips of the smallest cones around the inner wire and glue.
Pock wire through the center of your star and twist on both sides of the star to keep it in place.
Wrap the wire around the metal part of the wreath and bend so the star points out where you want it to.
Finish adding your stars and hand your wreath!
Congratulations! You’ve made your first book wreath. Hopefully you love it and will find the perfect place to hang it.
I’d love to hear about your crafting experience, so share your thoughts in the comments below.
Caitlin Berve is the author of When Magic Calls: A Collection of Modern Fairy Tales and currently working on a fantasy novel involving an arranged marriage, damsels who save themselves, and non-human shape-shifters. Through her company Ignited Ink Writing and MFA, she edits other people’s novels, creates video tutorials, teaches, and writes. Caitlin seeks to fill the world with the kind of writing that lingers with readers, pet all the fluffy and scaly animals she can, and find magic in modern times.