DIY Fall Book Pumpkin

Ahh…fall.  Pumpkins, apples, changing leaves…don’t you just love it?  I decided our apartment needed a little touch of fall, so with this tutorial as inspiration I made my very own book pumpkin.

Don’t you book lovers worry.  I didn’t waste anything that we wanted to read.  It was a book from my husband’s college days (one that he never read and neither of us intend on reading).  As a book-lover, as much as it pains me to say, it was a book destined for the trash.

The project itself was relatively time-consuming, but worth it.

Materials

• Book
• Hot glue
• X-Acto Knife or scissors (I used both)
• Coffee (optional, for if you want to give your book an aged look)
•  Paintbrush (optional)

How to Make a Book Pumpkin

Start by removing the front and back covers of your book.  You can also remove the glossy part of the spine if you want to.

Fold a piece of paper in half and make half a pumpkin shape.  Don’t round out the bottom of the pumpkin too much or it will not be able to stand.

Cut out your pumpkin template with scissors.

Open up your book to the middle of the book (it doesn’t have to be exact).  Place the template on the middle of the book and line up the fold with the spine of the book.

Trace around your pumpkin template with pencil.  Cut around the outline of your template with a scissors or X-Acto Knife.  Press hard with your X-Acto Knife and you should be able to cut through about five pages at a time.

Rip out the non-pumpkin part of the book.

The spine of your book will become the stem, so do not rip this off.  Rather, rip pages close to the spine of the book, but not completely off.  Continue cutting using the previously cut pages as a guideline.

When you get towards the bottom, make sure you have a piece of cardboard or some other barrier between the X-Acto Knife and the cutting surface so you don’t damage your table or work space.  Cut the last pages out and rip off the non-pumpkin part.

Cut off the little nubbin at the bottom, but leave the top for the stem.

If you’d like, you can skip to the hot gluing step below and be finished with your pumpkin.  I wanted to age my book a little bit, so I decided to distress it using coffee.

To distress the book, brew a strong pot of coffee.  Use a paintbrush to paint each page with a layer of coffee.

You can vary the darkness of the stain by leaving puddles on the page.  Another way you can vary the color is to “paint” the outside of the pumpkin so the edges get a darkened look.

Prop your book pages up about a fourth of the way through, halfway through, and three quarters of the way through so the book can dry.  I thought it would take about a day to dry and it ended up taking about three days, so give yourself ample drying time.  Vary the places that you prop your pages up based on what pages are dry and which are wet.  And if you get really impatient, set up a rig with a fan:

When your pages are dry, put hot glue on the binding and wrap the book around in a circle to get the pumpkin look.

To get your book pumpkin to stand, you’ll need to “fluff” the pages a little bit to get them to spread out.  This might take a while, so be patient….you’ll get there eventually.  I ended up hot gluing some of the pages to each other to try to get stubborn pages to move and that seemed to work.

Once you’re done, put it in a spot where it can be displayed and enjoy your little touch of fall in your house.

Looking for other fall-inspired projects?  Check out my reversible Thanksgiving blocks.