Victorian Paper Ornaments from Recycled Papers

1. Intro: Victorian Paper Ornaments: Hi, and welcome to Victorian paper ornaments made from recycled papers. So this class has two kind of cool components to it. The first is you get to make something fun. So we're going to make some paper ornaments using recycled book pages, decorative papers, and all kinds of fun textures and colors that you get to put together. The bonus part of this class is, it's actually a great skill builder, if you ever want to go on and do more classes in bookbinding or box making. So the skills that we're going to use to cover the cardboard insides of these ornaments are the same techniques that you use to make hardcover books or to cover paper boxes if you're doing an art form called cartonage. So you get kind of two skills in one. You get to make a fun project, and you get a little fundamental bookbinding. So this class uses basic bookbinding tools, and you can do the entire thing from recycled paper and materials that you find around your house. So paper ornaments like this were really popular in Victorian times, sort of the late 1800s. It was really kind of a fad to make ornaments from embossed and die cut paper, from decorative papers, and then to decorate them with glitter and sequins and tinsel, those kind of things. And so we're making ornaments as inspired by that tradition. But using our own kind of modern materials, and the way I especially like to use them is to recycle books that have seen better days. So I like to find books from the Thrift store that are not really readable anymore and be able to give them a new life as something fun. So in the next lesson, we'll talk about what our project is for this class, and then we'll jump in and get started. 2. Class Project: At the our project for this class is a simple one, and you're going to learn some great skills that you can use for all kinds of other projects. So we're going to learn how to make a wrapped board. And by board, I mean, we're going to use a kind of a thick cardboard piece. We're going to wrap it in a decorative paper, and we're going to put some kind of an art piece on the front of it. So you can choose to use your own artwork. You can repurpose thrift store books that have seen better days. You can use decorative papers. Pretty much anything you got around your house can be part of these ornaments. You just have to use a little bit of imagination. The next lesson, we'll talk about the materials and the tools you'll need for this project, and you can gather your supplies and get ready to make some ornaments. 3. Materials & Tools: Okay, let's jump in and talk about the tools and materials you'll need for your project. So I'm going to start with you will need some kind of a cutting blade. This is my favorite kind of folding cutting blade, but an exacto knife, a utility knife, anything like that. Make sure it has a new sharp blade in it. In addition to the blade, you'll need something to use as a straight edge. So I like these metal rulers with the cork back on them. Those work great. I also think it's really handy for this project. If you have a transparent or translucent triangle, this is hard to see on camera because it's clear. But because we're going to trim down some illustrations, I think it's helpful to be able to see through my cutting tool, which I can't see through the ruler. So some kind of a transparent straight edge would also be helpful. A bone folder will be a helpful tool. If you don't have a bone folder, a popsicle stick or a tongue depressor would work great. But we'll use those. You will want an all if you want to make a hanger on the top of your ornament so that we can punch a hole through. So this is just a bookbinding, stainless steel with a sharp point. These are pretty easy to find at the craft store. You also could probably get away with using a push pin, like a bulletin board tack push pin that you could use to make a hole in a pinch. We are going to use glue stick for this project. And for a couple of reasons, I have done a lot of this similar kind of project, and you can use glue on a brush. But glutick has the advantage of being pretty dry as glues go. And so it's not going to make your paper ripple up as it's drying. And so I think it works better for this project than using glue and a brush. Now, we'll talk about some of the kinds of paper. If you're using a heavier paper, you might need a stronger kind of stickier glue, and you might switch over to a glue with a brush that you're going to brush on. I recommend that you get the kind of glue stick which is clear and not the kind that has the purple coloring in it. That purple dye that they use is supposed to disappear completely when it dries and I have seen it kind of come back and show again. I always try to find the clear stuff if I can and not use the purple. You will want a pair of scissors, just for doing some trims of paper. And if you want to put a hanger again at the top of your ornament, it's helpful to have a tapestry needle that you can use to thread either a piece of decorative thread or some narrow ribbon. I have some just narrow metallic ribbon here that I'm going to use for mine. One other optional material you might want. I have some little silver spangles here, little sequins. These are really common for this kind of decoration, and so I like to add them as a fun little accent. This example here, I put a couple just on the front of it that kind of go along with the theme that I created for this ornament. So that's an optional material. Okay, so that kind of takes care of the tools that you'll need for this project, and I'm going to move these out of the way. And then we're going to talk about the materials or the papers that you'll need. So the first thing is, you need some kind of an illustration. Now, I have this example here. This is actually just an illustration that I did. So you can use your own artwork. Absolutely. So this is a little drawing of a dog that I did. It's on a piece of recycled security envelope. I did a whole series of these for friends that I illustrated their dogs and cats and other pets and made those as ornaments last year for some friends. So you can use your own illustration, or I have a bunch of examples, and what I'm going to do in class is to use a recycled book illustration. So I was lucky enough to find a copy at the Thrift store with really beautiful illustrations of one of my very, very favorite books, which is the Wizard of Oz. This one was in kind of terrible condition falling apart, so I am happy to reuse the pages. And so I've just pulled out some that have some really fun illustrations on them, and I'm going to use those for the examples. I also pulled one other thing which I think is fun. This is a calendar that I had from last year. This little B here, I think would be awesome to cut out and use as my sort of focus art piece that goes in the center of this. So I have that as an example, as well. So the first thing that you need is whatever artwork you want to kind of frame you want to feature. So it could be recycled anything. Holiday cards, fancy papers, book illustrations, you name it. That could be the feature. The other thing that you need is something to be the back. So this is where I like to use all kinds of decorative papers. This is a marbled paper here on the left side that I made. On the right side, this metallic paper is actually an origami paper that I found, but it's such a beautiful gold metallic that I use it for a lot of different things. So I pulled some examples of different kinds of art papers that you could use. So these two are both origami paper, have these really awesome, beautiful patterns on them, and the gold one is kind of metallic, which is fun. This is a piece of marbled paper, which I created. These two are both a handmade, like a mulberry paper that I got from the art supply store that have some silkscreen printing on them. One with kind of glitter and this one has got some gold metallic. I think anytime, especially if you're making a holiday ornament, that you can add some kind of metallic that catches the light, I think that's really fun. So those are handmade papers. As is this one. This was leftover from another project. This is like a Japanese printed paper. And then one other one I pulled out. This is actually a page from a vintage magazine. It's a set of magazines from my local County History Museum that they were giving away. And I took a bunch of pages of those and just painted over them with some acrylic paint. So they have this great kind of paint stroke texture, and you can read a little bit of the words from in between. So those are an example of some of the kind of decorative papers you could use to wrap the outside of your ornament. I think if you're choosing a paper, try to pick something that is probably light to medium weight. We do need to wrap it all the way from the back to the front, and so it has to make sort of a big bend around. And if your paper is really stiff, it's sometimes is hard to do that. Okay, so we have the outside papers, the cover papers. Then I want to talk about what goes inside. So there are lots of different materials, again, you can use to put on the inside. These two this dark colored cardboard, this is called Bookboard. And you'll find this at the art supply store. It is a really dense, hard kind of cardboard. It's very similar to, like, what cereal boxes are made from, but just much thicker. Um, so you can find this at places like your local art supply store, and this is what they use to make hardcover books, which is kind of what this process is based on. So this bookboard works great, especially if you have small scraps. If you don't want to buy a bookboard, you don't want to go find some, then you can look for any kind of cardboard. You want something that is about an eighth of an inch thick. So you can check it with your ruler. These two pieces are backer board that I got from a place that sells packaging for, like, packaging paintings and prints that artists do. And so it's just a piece of, like, plain cardboard that's meant to make it stiff, so you can ship prints and that kind of thing. So actually, this backer board, this thick one is my favorite one. And I'll put some of these that I've mentioned, some of these resources in the handout for this class. So you can see some places like my favorite places to get some of these materials. Okay? So you're going to need a piece of kind of medium weight, eight inch thick or so cardboard to make the kind of interior of your ornament. Okay, then finally, the last tool or material you'll need. If you look in the handouts for this class, in addition to those resources, I'm going to put this corner template in your handout. This is a not required but really helpful tool that's going to help us trim down. We're going to need to cut some corners at a 45 degree angle, and this little template will help us do that. So if you want to go ahead and print that out, you can either print it and trace it onto a heavier weight paper or just print it directly if your printer will do that onto a heavier weight paper. That's going to be a really helpful tool when we get to the step that we need to trim down our papers. Okay, so that takes care of all of the materials and tools that you'll need for this project, and we will start creating our ornaments in the next lesson. 4. Trimming Your Art: A Okay, our first step is we want to prepare the illustration, whatever the feature art is going to be. So I'm going to use one of these pages from the Thrift store book that I have, and I love this one. This is one of my very favorites. So this is the one I'm going to use. So the first thing I need to do is trim this down into the size that I want for my ornament. And this is going to vary. Everybody's will be a little bit different. So a couple of tools for this part. You ruler, this clear triangle or L, if you have one of those and your razor blade, you're cutting. I'm also going to use the cutting mat underneath here because I can line up the edge of my page and try to cut everything square so that I can get this trimmed down. So the way I'm going to tackle this, I think is I'm going to line up my page on the cutting mat. And I'm first going to just make a cut across kind of underneath their feet. I'm just going to eyeball this. This is where your triangle can be helpful. So I don't like to cut against the triangle because it's plastic and it's easy to cut into it. But I can use that to figure out where I want to make that cut about there and then line up my ruler against that. I can use the 90 degree triangle just to make sure I've got everything square. There we go. And then move it out of the way. So I'm going to start with one cut there. I'm going to set this just off to the side. And let's see. I'm just going to keep working my way around. So I just want to trim this down. So all I'm seeing is the illustration. I'm gonna go about here. And if you are in doubt, always trim it a little bit bigger than you think you'll need because it's easier to, you know, easy to go smaller. You can't make it bigger again. It looks pretty good. I'm just using my cutting mat for each of these, lining it up so that I keep everything kind of square. I'm going to use my triangle again to kind of help me place. I don't want to accidentally cut off the top of the scarecrow's hat. That's about right there. Alright, and one more trim. And it doesn't really matter what size this turns out. We're gonna measure all the other pieces from this one. Um, I want to make sure I get that. Like, as tight as I can. That looks about right. Um, I totally put that on the wrong side. Now, I can't put my ruler down. Let's try that again. Okay, so I have my illustration now trimmed down to the size I want it. So that's going to be the center, the feature in the middle of my ornament. Okay. In the next lesson, we're going to grab our cardboard piece, what's going to be the interior of the ornament, and we're going to cut that to size. 5. Cutting the Inner Cardboard Layer: Okay, ready to cut down my cardboard. I'm going to use this kind of thick backer board that's my favorite for doing these. I need to cut a piece of cardboard that is a quarter of an inch larger on each side. So a total of half an inch larger, half an inch wider and half an inch taller. So I am going to measure this and get kind of an approximate size. So my piece here is about two and three quarters. By about 2.5. And I don't have to be super exact about this. So, you know, you can go to the closest 16th of an inch. Okay, so this measurement is 2.5, so I want to add a half an inch or a quarter of an inch on each side. So I need a three inch piece. So I'm going to start by just cutting this down. So I've got a piece that's 3 " wide, and I'm once again just using my cutting mat and my ruler together not quite straight. Try that. Okay. And this thick cardboard sometimes take us a couple of passes to cut through. There we go. It feels like I'm all the way through. Okay, so there's 3 ". So that should be the height of my piece. All right. And then it was two and three quarters two and three quarters. So I'm going to add a half an inch, so that means I want three and a quarter. So I'm going to cut got a little tear on that end, so I'm going to cut from this end. So three and a quarter. And I'm actually going to measure this and mark it with a pencil because my cutting mat only has half inch increments and not quarter inch. So I'm just going to make sure that I have some guidelines to work from. So three and a quarter, and I'll make one more little mark at three and a quarter. Okay, now I can line up my ruler between those two marks. Okay. So there is my cardboard piece, and I can just do a test fit with my artwork. I set it on top. And what I'm looking for is that there's a quarter of an inch around each side a little bit bigger. So it makes a nice kind of frame for this piece. All right. Once you have your interior piece, your cardboard piece cut, then we will go on to the decorative paper in the next lesson. 6. Cutting Your Decorative Cover Paper: Okay. Now I've got my decorative paper, which is going to show on the back side of my ornament, and then it's going to wrap around to the front and you're going to see a little frame of that paper around the front edge. This marbled green paper seemed like the obvious choice to go with this one. And so this piece, we're going to measure off of our cardboard piece. We need to add instead of a quarter of an inch, we need to add a half an inch on each side of this and on the top and the bottom. And in fact, I'm a little bit generous with a half an inch, so I like to add maybe five eighths of an inch just to account for. We're going to wrap it around the thickness of this cardboard. And so I like to have just a little bit of extra to go all the way around. Okay. This is where it might be helpful to have a piece of scrap paper and we're going to make a little note. So I'm going to grab a piece of scrap paper from over here. My cardboard piece is three and a quarter, five, three. Okay. So three and a quarter by three, I want to add five eighths of an inch on all of the sides. So I need to add five eighths of an inch on the left and five eighths of an inch on the right. And then same thing, five eighths plus five eighths on the top and the bottom. Okay? So that's going to give us a piece that's big enough to wrap around all the sides. So five eighths and five eighths is the same as an inch and a quarter. So this is one and a quarter. Three and a quarter and one and a quarter gives us 4.5. Same thing here. This actually equals one and a quarter. This will be by four and a quarter. Okay. Okay, so I'm going to pull my decorative paper over and I'm going to cut a piece that is 4.5 by four and a quarter. I'm going to measure and mark this from the back because it's easier to see. The front side of this is really busy, and I'm going to use my cutting mat and my ruler again. Okay, so 4.5. Here's 4.5. I'm going to make a couple of little marks. Okay. And then by four and a quarter four and a quarter, I've just done up. Okay. So now we've got our decorative paper, which is now five eighths of an inch larger on all sides. Okay, so we have finished cutting our three pieces, and we are ready to start assembling and we'll start that in the next lesson. 7. Wrapping the Board: B. Okay, we are ready to start covering our board, our cardboard. I've grabbed a piece of just plain copy paper. I'm going to use that as an extra kind of catch because we're going to glue this paper, and I don't want to get glue all over my table. Now, I often use just pages out of catalogs and magazines as my glue paper, but it is a little hard to see on camera what's going on. So that's why I grabbed a sheet of plain white. Okay, so I'm going to grab my cardboard and my decorative paper. We're going to start with that first. And I am going to put the decorative paper face down and my cardboard piece. I need to glue down first thing is centering it in the middle of this space. Now, if it helps you, you can make some pencil marks on the back. Otherwise, you can eyeball it. It's totally fine to just look at the four sides and make sure that you've got it centered. This is where we're gonna pull out the glue stick. I'm going to encourage you to be very generous with glue stick. We want to make sure that we have plenty of glue to stick this together so that it's not going to come apart. Um, so don't be don't be stingy with your glue stick. So I'm going to put glue on the entire back surface of my cardboard piece. And I like to do that, so I kind of keep control of where the glue is. I do a specific kind of motion to add the glue, which is I make kind of a starburst shape where I start in the center and I go towards the outside edge. And I'm just going around kind of like in a radiating circle. Now, why I do it this way is if you go the other direction and you pull towards the center, it's really easy to get globs of glue on the edge of your cardboard, and that's not um really helpful. Then you get glue that kind of oozes out everywhere. So I try to do glue kind of going towards the outside. Make sure I've got some right in the center. And when I'm pretty sure I have the whole backside of it done, you want to work kind of fast because this glue dries quickly. I'm going to flip it over and get it centered on my paper and then just press down with my fingertips. To get it to stick on, put the cap on my glue stick. Then I'm going to flip it over and grab my bone folder, and I'm just going to use, the flat side of the bone folder to do that same radiating motion where I'm going from the center towards the outside, and I'm just making sure that this paper and the cardboard have made really good contact with one another. I'm going to get any little lumps and bubbles or anything else like that out of it. Okay. So there's our first step, glued down. Now you're going to need that template that we created. So this is our corner template. I'm going to just cut this out. Now, I have these made up in some acrylic plastic that I use in my studio because I use them all the time. But this one made out of paper is going to work great for this project. So I'm just cutting out on the lines. Now, mine is printed on just plain copier paper. I kind of recommend that you print it on a little bit heavier paper or trace it onto a piece of a little bit heavier paper. There is my corner template, and I'm just going to move my white paper out of the way so you can see a little better. I'm going to use this to draw some 45 degree angles at the corners because we need to trim away some of the corners here so that we can wrap this around the front side of our cardboard. And this is spaced out so that that little gap that's right here in the center is about an eighth of an inch, which is about the thickness of your cardboard. So that is kind of the distance away from the corner that we want to go. So if you have much thicker cardboard than I'm using, you might need a little bit of extra space when you draw these corners. If it's thinner, it should be fine. So here's how this little template works. You're going to take the corner, like inside corner of the template and just rest it up against the cardboard corner. And you can see this makes a nice neat 45 degree angle. When I first learned how to do this kind of cover, which you use for making hardcover books, my teacher just eyeballed it and just just cut a 45 degree angle. I like the precision of having this little template. So I'm just going to draw a line. And take my template away. And so now I have a 45 degree angle, and it is about an eighth of an inch away from the corner of my cardboard. So I'm just going to do that same thing on all four corners. I'm gonna nest my little template up against there. Oops. Pencil going a little all over the place. That's why a thicker paper helps a little bit. Gives your pencil something to go up against. Okay. There are my four corners, and I usually just trim these with scissors. It's hard to get a straight edge in here because the thickness of the cardboard and all of that. I usually do this step just with scissors and follow my pencil lines. So I'm going to trim off all four corners. Like so. All right. Now we are ready to wrap these four edges around to the front of our cardboard piece. I usually do this. I start with the short ends and then do the long ends next. It doesn't really matter, but that's just my habit, my pattern of doing them. I'm going to bring my extra waste paper back. What I want to do is I want to put glue on this entire tab right here. On one side, I do these one at a time because this glue dries fast. Again, be generous with the glue and make sure that you get all the way out to all the edges and the corners. Glue stick. I'm going right up against the cardboard as much as I can, so I get right in there. Okay. Now I'm going to pull the paper away from underneath. This is my favorite trick for getting this to curl around in a really nice smooth way. Instead of using my fingers, I'm going to take this is the glue tab. I'm going to set it down on the table. So it's flat down on the table in front of me, and then I'm going to lift up my cardboard piece and I'm pushing down to the table. I'm just rolling it up so it stands straight up in the air and then all the way down flat on the table towards me. That's going to make a really smooth fold right here. Okay. Then I'm going to pick it up. I'm going to grab my bone folder, and I'm just going to do the same thing we were doing before. Use the edge of the bone folder to just smooth the whole way across the surface. And then I usually stand my bone folder up on edge and just go down the edge as well to make sure that the glue has made contact with the cardboard the whole way. Okay. Now we're going to do the opposite tab. So I'm going to bring my paper back over. Make sure that I'm not setting it down in someplace that has some wet glue on it. If I were using a catalog, I would turn the page, so I had a clean page. And I'm going to do the same thing. I'm going to put glue on this tab. And I'm going to make sure I get the whole thing with a generous amount of glue. Okay. I'm going to pull my paper out of the way. The tab that I'm gluing is facing me. I'm pressing down into the table and standing it up on end and then rolling flat down towards me and giving it a little press. Okay. Then we'll do the same thing with a bone folder. Just press over the whole thing and then stand it up and go along the edge. Okay, so we've got two opposite sides. Now, we're going to do one little trick before we do these remaining two tabs, which is, you will see if I hold this up close, right at the corner here, there is a little corner of paper there focused. And we want to kind of tuck that in so that it doesn't stick out. And I'm going to use my bone folder to do that. I'm going to zoom down with my camera so you can see this a little bit closer. I'm going to take my bone folder. I'm standing it up on edge, and I'm going to lay it against the edge that I've already glued. Then I'm just going to make a little pivot motion with my bone folder. As I'm sliding it here to the corner, I'm just going to pivot it around and go that way. It's like you're turning a corner in your car. And what happens when you do that is you'll see right there, there's a tiny little corner of paper that gets folded in. I can hold this up to the camera a little bit. There's that tiny little corner of paper folded in. That's what we are trying to accomplish there. All right, I'm going to do it on the other side here. I'm going to run along the side that's already been glued and then I'm just turning the corner and you'll see that little fold, folded in. That's the motion that I'm doing is I go straight down that side and then follow the corner around. I've done the two ends on this side of my ornament, now I need to do the opposite end and I'm going to zoom my camera back out a little bit again. Standing my bone folder up on edge, coming up and turning the corner. Tucking in that little triangle, and then I'll do the other side coming up and turning the corner. That one popped up a little bit. I'm just gonna push it down. There we go. Alright. It seems like a funny little step, but just that little bit of attention is going to make these corners turn out really beautiful when we turn these last two. Alright. Last two corners. Once again, I'm going to make sure that I'm setting it down on a clean space on my paper. I'm gonna zoom my camera back out so you can see the whole thing. Grabbing my glue stick again and I'm going to glue now the opposite tabs. Same way, be careful when you get to that little tab of paper that you don't catch it with the glue stick. I try to move the glue stick coming in. Sometimes you'll get a little glob of glue stick right there because the papers thicker. Just be conscious of where your glue is so you're not getting it where you don't intend it to be. Okay. Got a little extra glob of glue there. I'm just going to wipe off. Okay, so I picked it up. I'm moving my wastepaper out of the way, and I'm going to do that corner the same way I've done before. I'm going to put it down flat on the table. I'm gonna stand it up towards me, and I'm going to roll it over. And when I pick this up, you should see we've now got these beautiful mitred corners. I once again want to make sure I go over it with a bone folder. Once in a while, you'll get a little tiny bit of glue that comes out that you just want to catch, wipe away. Got a little corner of paper there. Your bone folder can fix a lot of things. If you see anything that's sticking up or a fold that doesn't quite look right, you want to just hit it with a bone folder and make sure everything is making really good contact, and then one more time against this edge. Okay, so we've got a beautiful finished corner there. Now we're going to do the same thing on the opposite side. I'm actually going to just fold my paper in half because I can see I've got glue kind of everywhere. I don't want to get it on the front of my piece. All right? One more time. I'm getting glue. I'm just being careful at those edges that I have a glob of glue there. Just make sure I don't get that where I don't want it to be Okay, moving that out of the way, pressing down into the table, standing it up, and rolling it over. Ooh, I had a little bit of glue oozing out there. I just want to catch that quick. Use just the edge of my fingernail. Don't want that coming off on the front of my piece. And then one more time going over everything with the bone folder just to make sure that it's really good and stuck down, catching any little bit of glue. If you've got anything kind of sticking out at a corner, you can use your bone folder to kind of round it over. Okay. And there is the finished wrap from the back. So there's our backside wrapped to the front. Okay. And now we just need to add the art. So that piece is going to go right here because we wrapped a half an inch around to the front and we left a quarter of an inch border. That means your art should cover up all the edges. Are there. So now I just need to put some glue stick on the entire back surface of this art piece, and then I can glue it down. One more time I'm going to just fold over my paper so I make sure I don't get glue where I don't want it. And I'm going to use that same motion I did before with the glue stick where I'm coming from the center to the outside. I don't want to catch the edge of this paper and tear it or wrinkle it up. So I'm going to do this same making kind of a star burst by going from the center to the outside all the way around. And then make sure I've got a little in the center. Then if you set it down really gently, you can adjust and you have a few seconds to move it around. Here we go. Got it centered. Once I'm happy with where it is, again, bone folder is important. A little extra glue there. But I'm going to go around the whole piece and just make sure that it's made contact everywhere. Okay, at this point, I like to take this piece and put it under a little bit of weight and let it dry for a couple of hours. We have added moisture in the form of the glue to all of these different paper surfaces, and they are going to want to try and curl and crinkle. And so what I do is I grab this is just a roll of waxed paper, and I use this a lot. So I have pieces on here. That have been well loved. I use waxed paper because then it doesn't stick to whatever I'm putting on top of it or doesn't stick to my desk surface just in case there's a little extra glue. So I'm going to put a piece of waxed paper just underneath I'm going to put one on top. And then I'm just going to put some kind of a weight on top of this and let it sit for a couple of hours. So I have a little book weight. This is one that I just use for book binding, but you could use a heavy book, a can of soup, anything like that that just has a little bit of weight to it, and you want it to cover up most of your piece. And then you want to let this sit and dry for a couple of hours. 8. Finishing Your Ornament: Okay, I have let my ornament dry, so I'm going to unpack this now from the waxed paper. And now we can talk about how to finish this up. Now, this could be done exactly how it is, and we could put a hanger on it, but there's a couple of other fun things you can do. So here are some other examples. On this one, I decided it would be fun to take some words from another page of the book and make a little story on the back of it. Now, I just kind of played, I don't know, Madlib style with this. This wasn't actually a sentence from the book. I just made my own sentence. So it's kind of like I'm writing my own little bit of the story. That I cut out from the rest of the pages. And because I talked about the little stars on the front, I added two of those little sequin stars because I thought that would be a really fun addition. On this version, another book that you might recognize, this is another one I found at the Thrift store in colored on and falling apart condition. I found a couple of phrases that I put on the back of this one as well. If you are doing something like making your own artwork, like illustrating pets, this one I left blank, but you could put the pet's name, you could put the date. You could put a little message, anything like that, that you can either cut out of book illustrations, you could use stickers, you could write on it with a paint marker or anything like that. I want to add a little bit of story to the back of this one because I think it will be fun. I'm going to look at the pieces that I set aside and see if there's something fun Okay. I think what I'm going to do is I'm just going to use the phrase on to the Emerald City because I think that goes with the picture on the front. So I'm just going to cut that part out I'm going to use the little phrase onto the Emerald City, and I have some little glittery sequins that are green hearts, which I think is going to be perfect to go along with onto the Emerald City. So I'm going to add that as well. I'm going to use a little bit of craft glue, some tacky glue to stick down the sequin because I don't think the glue stick is going to hold it in place. But I can use glue stick to stick down the little phrase that I cut out. Now, you don't have to add words, of course, or you can take them from other places, anything like that, but I think this is fun since I have that page. And let's see. I'm going to put it down here on the Emerald City. And then I'm going to put a little dot of craft glue so I can add this little green heart that I have just because it seems kind of perfect to go with a theme. To the Emerald City. Okay. All right. I'm going to let those things dry for just a few minutes. Then we'll talk about finishing up Uh, you can put a hanging loop on the top of it and make it really just like an ornament. These ones, I just punched a hole with an all and threaded through a ribbon. So I think I'll do that with this one. But I wanted to show you one other example because I think this one is really fun. So this is a fortune from a fortune Cookie, which I thought was really funny. And I made this one into a magnet. I just glued a magnet on the back of it, and it is usually on my file cabinet behind me because I thought this was really a funny little phrase. So that's another way you could finish these, especially if you have a small one like that. Okay. I think that's probably dry enough to go to the next part. So I have my, and I want to make a hole if I'm gonna hang it that is in the center of the top so that it is gonna hang kind of going straight. So I'm gonna need to measure that to find the center. I have three and a quarter, so that's 1.5 plus another eighth that I need to go over. I just want to go far enough down into the cardboard so that it's not going to just pull right through. So 1.5 plus another eighth should get me right in the center. About there. Okay. I have a mat underneath here so I can just use my all to kind of punch through, make sure that you're not punching into your table or something like that. I've got a little hole at the top, and I'm going to cut just a little piece of my gold ribbon and this tapestry needle. You could also use metallic or a decorative thread, anything you want to. I like to stitch the ribbon through versus just gluing it on because I think they are sturdier, they stay put better. Okay. And then I'm just gonna tie the ends with a ribbon together. And there's the back. 9. Wrap Up : Okay, just a little recap so you can think about what you want to do for your project for this class. So a couple of ideas we talked about. You can use some vintage book illustrations. It's especially great if you can rescue some books that maybe aren't good for reading anymore, but you can give them a new life. So we did that with several of them. On some of them, we put a little bit of a story on the back side, so you can add some text or some personalization, if you want to. We also repurposed things like fortune Cookie. Fortune to make that magnet. Or you can illustrate your own artwork. I did a cat and a dog here and mounted them on a little bit of solid colored paper and put them together the same way. So you can recycle any kind of paper that you want to and add some fun details like some little sequins, different kinds of paper, recycled paper ephemera. That would be a very Victorian kind of thing to do, especially if you add things that add some sparkle or some metallic to your design. I would love to see what you do with your ornament. So be sure to post your project photo and tell us a little about it in the project section for this class. And I hope to see you for another class with me sometime soon.