Pinspiration Sunday: Upcycled Book into Pumpkin

Since my best friend, Angela, and I raided a yard sale scooping up a ton of old Reader’s Digest books, I’ve been looking for projects I could do with them. Making a pumpkin seemed like a really great idea…at the time….I only say that because it’s a long tedious project. Just like my recycled book into keepsake box, this involves a lot of time cutting pages with an xacto knife.

Well anyways…let’s get started, shall we? First things first gather your supplies

I used:

Old Reader’s Digest book

Pattern from BHG—cut out

Valspar's La Fonda Copper Spray Paint

Acrylic Spray Sealant

Cinnamon stick

Burlap

Tattered Angel’s Glimmer mist

Lace/ribbon

Hot glue and gun

First I removed the cover and binding from my book (and put it away for safe keeping so I could do something with it later on). 

Next put my pattern on the book, traced it and started cutting away…this takes FOREVER…and with my RA, it didn’t feel so good on my wrist…but after awhile (for me I did it in stages over many days) you cut through all the pages and you have something that looks like this:

Now it’s time to start hot gluing pages. First, you want to glue the first and last pages together to make the pumpkin fully round. Next, you take a strip of hot glue along the binding, top to bottom, throughout the book. This helps separate the pages a little to make the pumpkin fuller. 

Space between the first and last page--glue these together

Start gluing between pages at the binding--make it full all the way around---fill in gaps

After, I did this, I sprayed the entire thing with my orange spray paint. I tried to separate pages so that the color would get on the inside as well…I was covered in paint by the end but the pumpkin looked good. I let that dry overnight. Then I carefully separated any pages that got stuck together from the paint and I added more hot glue along the binding to help separate pages as needed. Then I sprayed the pumpkin with my acrylic sealer. After that dried it was time to add the finishing touches. 

I took a cinnamon stick and broke it in half, and stuck one half in the center opening of the pumpkin top. I had some burlap leaves on hand that I made up a while ago using mod podged burlap and Tim Holt’s tattered leaves sizzix die. My leaves were in neutral colors so I decided to glimmer mist it using Tattered Angels leapfrog glimmer mist.

 Once that dried (I hurried it along with my heating tool), I hot glued it into place. I finished it off with a piece of lace ribbon that I tied around the pumpkin’s stem.

And there you have it…a pumpkin upcycled from a book! Hope you enjoyed this tutorial! Thanks for stopping by!