A funny thing happened on the way to my forest!

Okay, so, my hubby came upstairs to me and presented me with a surprise!

He uses these journals for every day on the job.  Writes down notes, hours, contact information etc.  He decided it is time to get rid of some of the old ones.  What did he do?

Made a tree!!  How cool is that?  It's dated, you can see his handwriting on some pages and it is just too neat!

Added a plate hanger to it, glued down the top corners so the pages stay flat and waalaa, a hanging book folding!

This is how it looks with the rest of the forest:

I think my hubby has been holding out on me!  It's neat that these are dated with the years on them, think I need more, don't you?  

PSSST, honey, go straighten it, it's hanging crooked!

OMG Etsy shop!

Some times I just have to share!  This is so great and makes me want to run out and buy a turtle!  Go check out this shop:

(click on banner)

Just a few items you'll find:

Happy Thanksgiving!

Christmas Paper Projects

Have a few items in my RunsWithScissors shop for Christmas and there's still time for custom orders!

Some paper beads!

Christmas plaid.

Christmas Scribbles

One orb left!  Ho Ho Ho!

Gift tags:

And some notepads!

Shop early if you want to place a custom order!

My forest of trees

I needed to find a home for my trees and didn't want to put them away, just to get them out again in a week or two. I decided to clean off my small cabinet that usually holds my antique glassware and set it up with the forest! Along with my shell critter collection:

I cannot make anymore trees!  I don't have the room for them.

1 potato

Look what came out of my potato bag tonight!

Such small things excite me.

More Trees!

I thought I was done.  Really I did.  I liked this look:

I like how these looked, but then I thought, I wonder how small I could make one!  And along came these:

I had to cut and bind these myself.  I cut the first one 4 x 5" from old school ruled exhibition paper.  It worked!  I got a cute smaller one, 5" tall,  um, wonder if I could go even smaller.  I took extra cuts from the first one and cut them down to 2 x 3" and bound those, let it dry and set off to fold all the little pages!  They aren't really as white as the photo looks, they have the same vintage look as the others.  Now I have a whole forest!

I hate to say it, but now I have yet another idea for them!  Stay tuned to see if it works.

My newest project!

I've been fascinated by book folding for some time now and finally decided to give it a try.  Now, I wanted something fast and mindless to do so don't be looking for the ones you need to set up an Excel spreadsheet to do!  Those are amazing and I'll let them to the experts.

I did a search of the Internet and came up with a few different ones I thought I'd like.  I fell in love with the trees, just in time for Christmas!  Here is what I did!

Aren't they just fab!!!???  You can decorate them, if you want to but I wanted to go with a vintage look and think I pulled that off.  Some people paint the edges or glue and glitter but I'm leaving mine just like this.

The smallest one is made from about 60 pages of a paperback book.  The medium one is from a Super Pages phone book we get in this area.  The pages are lighter weight and it took a lot more pages.  The largest one and my favorite one, is made from the pages of a vintage dictionary!!  The pages are thick and easy to work with.

A few tips I had to find out on my own:

1.  Don't use any books or magazines that use staples, they won't work.  The pages will just fall out when you get to the center.
2.  When using vintage books, don't even try to use one with brittle pages, the end results aren't the nicest because the paper will feather.
3.  Watch your vintage books for how they are bound.  The dictionary I used was so old they had used thread/string for binding and this doesn't work so well, I had to use my own binding glue to glue them together before being able to use the pages but it was well worth it!
4.  Don't get discouraged if you do one and it doesn't look full in the back, I have a solution!  Make a second one using the number of pages you think you'll need, usually the same amount as the one you all ready made or more, then just hot glue the two together!!!

Think about this, these are SO inexpensive to do.  Use items around the house such as books or magazines.  The phone book was free, the dictionary I found on the curb for trash and made hubby stop and pick it up (boy am I happy he did) and paperbacks are around 50 cents each at thrift shops!  The folding is easy enough for children to do, so throw a glitter party and have them make them up for you!  LOL!

I have a few other ideas in my head that I might try but for now, that's all I've done!  Hope you like them!