Witch's Spell Book

Here's another Halloween project you can make for cheap - your own Spell book! I've been wanting to make one of these since last year and given what my costume is for my Halloween extravaganza at work, this was the perfect opportunity. I was originally going to do the witches' spell from Macbeth, but decided on these two spells because it fits better with my theme. Any guesses on who I'm going to be?

I started by making the two spell pages. I designed mine in Photoshop because that is my software of choice. The internet is such a beautiful thing when it comes to finding free stuff. I got the fonts for free from Dafont (my favorite resource for cool fonts). The skull is courtesy of The Graphics Fairy (love, love, love her free clipart) and the apple was from an artist on Deviant Art.

Anyway, I bought a book at Goodwill for $2. I brought it home and painted the edges with a reddish-brown watercolor (extra water) and tried to rough it up by curling the edges. I also used another brown acrylic paint to give it some dimension. Then I just roughly cut out the pages I had designed and spray mounted them on, working the edges into the curls. Lastly, I added a bookmark which is just a strip of black ribbon hot glued to the spine on the back.

The book is just meant as a display prop, not for people to go flipping through. Otherwise I would have covered the front and hand stained or painted every page, not just the sides. It was kind of fun messing up this book. I can't tell you how many times I've damaged books on accident (reading in the bathtub), but never on purpose! If I were to do another one, I was thinking of a different approach for the pages. Maybe dipping all the pages in coffee or tea and letting it dry out like that? If anybody tries this, let me know what your results were!