bookworm.

i have been inundated of late (huh?) with craft projects involving pages from various books, and i'm pretty jazzed about it. have i mentioned how much i love books? i really do. they are like educational crack, and i find that, when piled about the joint, they add heaps of charm to most homes. so this little number, courtesy of pottery barn, is on my to-do list short list. when i get it figured out, i'll attempt some sort of editorial do-it-yourself tutorial. or maybe i'll just dig around on al gore's interweb, and see if someone else already did it (like this gal). i think it would be super cute for valentine's day, which, whether you like it or not, is just around the corner. what? we can prep for stupid christmas seven months in advance, but not valentines? i should add that the caddywompus matching bedding is giving me an OCD heart attack. why not just have both beds the same, already?

i don't know if it's due to october being national book month, or because november was national novel writing month (nanowrimo, for you insiders), but book recycling is really on a hot streak. that's bueno with me, because if i'm going to rip up some tomes (THE HORRORS!), i'd like to max out my crafting opportunities. i'm not sure when i would use this book bunting, but man. it sure is rad. maybe it could hang at that bitchin' valentine's party you're going to throw (see aforementioned Wreath Project). and p.s.- if you don't like homemade bunting, your heart may as well be a giant block of coal.last night, in an effort to kick off my valentine's crafting, i searched through our extensive book collection hoping to find a few that could be re-appropriated to the craft room. i only came up with one book that i thought i could part with, and it turned out to be brad's. for those of you not familiar with brad, you should first know that he is a lot smarter than me. he is a savant, an intellectual, a scholar. he has a ton of really smarty pants books written by aristotle, dante and ayn rand, and he's READ THEM. my book collection, on the other hand, includes literary classics such as the hardy boys, the twilight series, rolling stone's top 500 albums of all time, and Name That Baby, circa 1976. you know, in case you want to name your daughter jennifer. there are times when i don't think brad takes my book-collecting very seriously, but that isn't why our bookshelves are a major sore spot. it probably stems from the time i insisted brad purchase a huge shelving system (from ikea) which i quickly painted (badly) and we assembled, and all of this went down approximately 3 hours prior to having a major party at our house. okay, not 3 hours. that would be crazy. it was more like 32 hours. my partner in crime (aka the guest of honor), audrey, came over to help arrange the books and accessories on the shelves, and we worked late into the night unpacking the nine katrillion boxes of books that had been sitting in the living room for nearly a year. people never understand that unless you work in a library, there is an ART involved with bookshelf-arranging. it takes TIME and there are RULES. you need to incorporate a lot of non-book items, like trophies you won in 1984 at the douglas county fair turtle race. books have to be stacked both vertically and horizontally, and often need to be sorted by color and size, sometimes by subject matter. book jackets should be removed from your books (and i don't care who you think you are: book jackets are ugly and they belong in the trash)... UNLESS those book jackets are on first editions of very important fancy books that your fiance (common law husband) owns. so despite the fact that i lied, and told brad that the book jackets had been saved in a box, and despite the fact that i was able to retrieve all but one first edition book jacket (uh, from the trash), and despite the fact that i ironed all of them and returned them to their respective covers, brad was angry and has chosen to be kind of grumpy about our now-amazing bookshelves. not as angry as the time we went to new orleans and i got us kicked out of our hotel by trying to sneak in steve, but pretty mad. that's another story though. so enjoy your bibliophile crafts, but do yourself a favor, and don't try to use any of brad's books.

{via oh so beautiful paper, the sweetest occasion, two and six}