More than a million words, nearly 3500 pages,
198 chapters, 8 movies, 7 books, one story.
When I saw the tutorial for these miniature Harry Potter Book Ornaments I knew I had to make them for my daughter's Harry Potter Christmas Tree Advent Calendar. It looked like a rather complicated and time consuming craft, so of course I wasted quite some time trying to find an easier way to do this. But it was impossible to find ready made miniature books that I just could have put Harry Potter dust jackets onto, so I ultimately ended up doing it the hard way, please see the very instructable tutorial in the link above.
The first problem I encountered was the making of the dust jackets. My Harry Potter books are a mix of editions, some UK paperbacks, a UK hardcover and a couple of US hardcovers. So I couldn't just scan and print my own dust jackets. Finding usable images online also proved to be very difficult, and I had to do quite a lot of cutting, pasting and resizing to get an acceptable result. This is the actual image I printed, the UK editions, each dust cover 6cm tall. They are far from perfect, and if you have actual dust covers available for scanning, I'd definitely go with that.
The second problem I encountered was to find regular paper matching the dust jacket colours, I could only find thick, carton-like paper. Trying to cover a cardboard hardcover template with that, like in the tutorial, would have been very difficult. So instead I decided to drop the cardboard hardcover template and just use the coloured carton. I cut pieces 12cm tall, folded 3cm in from each side and glued the whole thing together with Mod Podge to make a sturdy, 6cm tall strip of carton to make the hardcovers for the books. I hope you can see what I mean in the picture to the left.
I then made hard covers like in the tutorial, based on the size and foldings of the dust jackets. I Mod Podged the dust jackets onto the hard covers, and from there I followed the above mentioned tutorial. I found the cutting of pages for the mini-books from old paperback novels very difficult, as well as the gluing together. I didn't use those paperclips, though, and should have probably waited for the glue around the edges of the book pages to dry completely before inserting them into the hard covers, but I'm a person of little patience, and probably rushed the process a bit more than I should have. Finally I protected the dust jackets with a coat of Mod Podge, and of course added swirly, beaded ornament hooks for hanging. They turned out pretty nice, don't you think?
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