For our Church Anniversary we decided to do something big! We were turning 13 haha, finally becoming a teenager! We saw a picture of a simple book chandelier on Pinterest and we were inspired. The entire decor of the church was made of books. It was hard work, but the result was great(:
So I know this doesn't look great, and being a book lover it broke my heart to rip the pages out of all these old books, but it had to be done. So we ripped out each book page one by one and hot glued them along the edges to create a teardrop shape. We were careful not to fold the pages or it would become flat. Then we started hot gluing them together into long strands. When one strand got really long we started another strand out of that strand. We were attempting to create a tree effect. Each strand being a branch.
So there were two of us, I was doing the first step of gluing each individual page together and my sister was gluing them into strands.
The second part of the project was making the chandeliers. One book makes one chandelier. It's pretty simple actually, the first step is to remove the book cover. Next, one page at a time, fold each page towards the binding of the book. No glue necessary. The book then naturally becomes a cylinder like in the picture. When finished folding in the pages you can glue the length of the binding together (you can also do this before folding in the pages, your preference).
Making them into chandeliers was the harder and more time-consuming part. We used twine to connect them to metal rings (easier to buy than make yourself). The excess twine was used to wrap around the metal rings. Then we used needles with the little ball on top (I don't really know what it's called) to secure the neighboring books together. When we ran out of old books that were naturally yellowed we had to use newer ones. You can use this link: antique-ize a book in minutes to see how we fixed that problem(:
The chandeliers where on the stage..
