I recently was at a high end vintage inspired boutique in the quaint downtown area of my hometown. I came across these beautiful bound books whose covers were made of vintage children’s books and were filled with a few pages of the original book, and then the rest of it consisted of blank pages of paper. They were selling them for upwards of $20 each. I thought to myself, I could easily recreate this using books from Thrift Town! So I did.

I found an assortment of books ranging from children’s to travel, to art at Thrift Town. All of which were under $2 each.

Once I got the books, I needed to figure out how to get them bound properly. I went to my local office supply store and originally bought a binding machine and plastic bindings. Unfortunately this machine wasn’t strong enough to punch through the book covers. I then went to my local craft store and in the scrapbooking section found a binding machine and metal bindings for a fraction of the cost of the office supply store items. I returned what I didn’t need, and purchased what I did. I watched the YouTube video’s the website provided as tutorials and was ready to start my project. Here’s a photo of Zutter’s product below.

To start, I deconstructed the books I wished to use as covers. I used a razor to cut the front and back covers off the book, and set my binding machine to the desired settings and began punching.

As mentioned above, my inspiration book used a few of the original books pages. I wanted to do that with mine as well before mixing in the blank pages. I cut the pages to my desired length using a professional paper cutting machine, and then stuck the book pages and blank pages in the binding machine and punched the necessary holes.

Using the metal coil binding, I lined up the punched holes with the metal prongs of the coil binding and inserted the paper. I followed the directions on how to close the coils of the binding in order to bind my book together.

You can make smaller books as well using the same metal coil bindings, just use metal snips to cut the coil to your desired length. Here’s a few other examples of books I did. These make great gifts for teachers, baby showers, housewarming gifts, memory journals, and recipe books. Add some ribbon book markers, and even go one step further using a discarded book page twisted into a bow to tie the package with and you have a beautiful gift.

Here’s the live segment on Good Day Sacramento’s Thrifty Thursday:

http://gooddaysacramento.cbslocal.com/video/10190721-thrifty-thursday-transforming-thrifted-books/

Happy thrifting!

Gina Doglione-Nielsen is featured every week on Good Day Sacramento’s Thrifty Thursdays, and owns GNJ Consulting which handles Public, Social, and Media Relations for Thrift Town Stores. Gina lives in Northern California with her amazing husband Josh, and is constantly on the go with three “very active” and “strong personality” bambinos; aka Team Nielsen, and loves every minute of it.