Crafty Time!

So my friend Ashley and I found this old abandoned house/second hand store (family pipe dream ' trading post - second hand store) out in the middle of no-whereville. It was run by a bunch of hippies who skipped out and left a bunch of cool stuff in it. We were obviously not the first ones to raid it, but definitely the most happy with our pirate booty! Among other things we nabbed a bunch of these books that were in the back room:

Thus far I've only made book journals out of them (Tutorial to come soon but I have them for sale if you're interested let me know). But I've been scoping the web for other ideas and let me tell you, there is all sorts of AWESOME ways to repurpose old, ugly, outdated, or simply unwanted books. For one you can make them into ultra awesome clocks! see:

Tutorial here: http://www.rufflesandstuff.com/2009/11/time-for-good-book.html

Another tutorial I saw said that you should glue the pages together with modge podge or watered down Elmers glue. They then glued the block of pages to the front cover and attached the clockworks to it so it keeps the mechanism from putting too much pressure on the clock shaft. They left the back pages hanging free so you could open up the book as much as you wanted.

The next thing I loved was Book purses! They are SOOOOOoooOOOoooooOOOoo cute!

The best place I've seen to purchase already made ones is Etsy. So many artists have theirs up for sale, but if you want to make your own here's a good tutorial:

http://www.wikihow.com/Make-a-Book-Purse

I'd also suggest just googling it for pictures and ideas of what other people have done. I personally like the hard handles as opposed to beads, and if I can find a big enough book (this warrants a trip back to that old store) I'm gonna do a large one that hangs from the shoulder like the one above.

Anyway that's all for now, let me know if you find any other rockin' ideas for ways to save books that might not be worth reading, but are too great to get rid of quite yet.