Friday, April 22, 2011

Paperback Sculpture/ Mobile


I've been lazy. Since mid-January I have: moved, resettled, started a new job, not known when I was going to work (which leads to 12 hour sleepathons). Anyways, long story short, projects have either fallen by the wayside, or taken much much longer to complete. I've been pretty lazy about using my freetime productively (except in the area of cooking. Girl's gotta eat.). However, I've got some projects burning around my home, hopefully soon to be completed, and for now, I've got the start of one.

I made this little book mobile out of a free copy of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone (the world will not hurt for one less paperback copy of Harry Potter) and some 'jewels' I got from a friend. It's the test run for what will hopefully become several of these hanging from my ceiling.

I spent several hours watching netflix and folding pages back (quite the sacrifice, there), and then ripped off the covers. After folding all the pages, the binding started to curl, but not all the way around- in the future, I'll have to find books where the binding is better destroyed before I pick it up. I worried that if I artificially destroyed the binding, I would end up tearing the book in half. Ultimately, I used wood glue (I moved, this is what I have) to glue the two edges together, but it's still not perfect- there's a noticeable gap in the folded pages where I attached the front and back of the book.

After that, I punched a hole in the spine with a needle to thread fishing line through for hanging. I then ran some more fishing line through to hang the jewels (this allows me to dictate how far from the book they hang- if I had hung them on the same line, the book would have fallen further down and the spine would have ended up on top of the jewels, if not covering them).

As I said, I hope to have a couple more of these to hang, so that there's a jumble of them against the wall and corner. This one's hanging a little higher than I expected (I always forget how high my ceilings are), but I can adjust that on future ones.

3 comments:

Earthbound Spirit said...

Looks neat! Kind of a paper lantern effect, eh?

maggiehlaban said...

Yes! Though I may fold the other books differently, I'll blog the final once it's done!

Justine Urbikas said...

omg, this is so awesome! my parents just got rid of a bunch of books... I should have picked through and grabbed ones that might have worked well. but... I'm sure they'll get rid of another batch soon, they still have tons.