With Earth Day coming up, I'm thinking of recycled and upcycled crafts. My tagline this year is “conscientious creativity” and that means that I want to make practical, well thought-out projects. This map page wreath was an idea born from seeing stacks of maps in the pages of encyclopedias I was taking apart to use for book page wreaths. The maps looked really cool and I thought they might be a great way to make an interesting wreath and highlight these colorful pages from the outdated encyclopedias. I got the encyclopedias out of someone's trash after a community yard sale – the owners told us we could take the books because they had literally put them on the curb for the trash man to gather. The info is out of date, the books were falling apart, and we rescued them from the trash so I feel good about how I am using these books. Every time I post something like this, bibliophiles come around and lambaste me for “ruining” a book. Well, in my opinion I saved these books and gave them new life.
The way this wreath is constructed is almost exactly like the book page wreaths I've shared here and on my Youtube channel previously. The difference here is that I added a chipboard star, created with a Sizzix die, to the center and sprayed the wreath with Smooch Spritz, a sparkly spray ink, in stead of using spray paint to add color. I wanted the map pages to show through the bits of color and sparkle that I applied.
You'll need a few basic supplies you might already have in your stash or that can be easily found at the craft store:
- Book or map pages
- Glue Gun
- MDF Flat Wreath Form, 4″ to 6″
- Spray ink (optional)
- Chipboard star, made with Sizzix Star Die (optional)
This is a fun and simple project that you can do with any book that you want to rescue from the trash. I think it would look great if you used coloring book pages or children's book pages as well.
Here are some other book page projects to check out:
