I hated Dean Koontz’s book Dragon Tears. So… I decided to upcycle these tainted pages and my general discomfort into something beautiful – paper flowers. While I learned the basis of making paper flowers from a YouTube video, here’s how I upcycled this bad book into a floral fabrication…
Materials Used: Book, Scissors, Glue Stick.
Materials Not Pictured: Hot Glue Gun, Hot Glue Sticks
Based on the YouTube tutorial, I needed four paper squares to make petals which layer to create a flower. I grabbed my pocket sized copy of Dragon Tears (roughly 4.25” x 6.75”) in search of pages that were loose at the book’s spine. I ripped out four pages and measured out 4” x 4” squares – which compensated a quarter inch for the unevenly torn edges on these ripped pages.
Once my squares were cut, I followed the the tutorial to the letter (pun intended) while substituting a strong glue stick instead of tacky glue (okay fine, I didn’t follow it to the letter; I just wanted to make that dumb pun). I also used a hot glue gun to adhere the petal layers together instead of tacky glue. I plan to use these paper flowers in a costume piece so a solid adhesive is imperative.
I was pretty confident the tutorial would work with any type of paper but I was still surprised at how well the flowers turned out. A few words of advice: Try to select page squares with interesting text, symbols, or lack of text and symbols to make the resulting flower more dynamic. Be careful when curling petals because pages are very fragile and I ripped a small petal chunk in the process.
Just remember to take your time since there is no back petal-ing… I’ll see myself out now.
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