DIY- Recycled Book Trees

Here is another festive and slightly geeky way to ring in the holidays. After weeding the Fiction section in the library where I work I was loaded up with lots of old books. These were destined to go to the shredder until I snagged them for some fun Christmas trees. I still needed a few and asked some friends on Social media.

If you ever announce on social media that you need old books to cut up, be prepared for the backlash! I thought that recycling old books that were destined for the shredder or the trash would be a perfect homage to everything literary. Holy wow was I in for a surprise! People kinda freaked out when I said I wanted books to cut up. Reactions varied from “OMG- I feel kinda sick” to “Murderer”. Granted several responses were meant as a joke.

In response to my friends and their utter horror that I would dare destroy a book… I posted the following photo:

Yes, that is a butcher knife and a ~~dead~~ book.

Other than tormenting my archiving friends, I did have a purpose for destroying readable books. I found a DIY link for recycled book page Christmas trees. I thought they would be cute for our Library party as give-aways.

Here is the link for the easy stacked page trees: Stacked Trees
Here is the link for the easy curled page trees: Curled pages

Six hours and six trees later I can say that Pinterest is full of lies. Things are never easy. Take any craft on Pinterest and multiply it by an hour and add a date with a vacuum cleaner. I am still finding bits of book pages all over the house. However, despite my complaints they did turn out pretty cute.

I also had fun ripping pages out of books. It was liberating and I felt like a very naughty library lady! Bound to Stay Bound lives up to its name. Those were the hardest books to take apart. I had to use the Mister’s pliers and wire cutters to get the pages out of the sewn binding. I am hoping the other Librarians like the little trees. I like the curled pages the best. I made my own cones out of paper and hot glued the strips of paper on. It was much faster than using pins and foam.