How to make wallpaper Home Sweet Home books

• Three books
• Resene Wallpaper – you could use leftover from a project or use the Resene Wallpaper cut-length service to buy a range of designs, Fleur used Resene Wallpaper Collection 525755 (purple vines) and Resene Wallpaper Collection E358004 (cream flowers)
• Pen
• Scissors
• Sellotape
• Resene testpots in your choice of paint colour, Fleur used Resene Blue Diamond and Resene Apache
• Small paintbrush

Instructions

Step 1:  For this project you will need three books and two wallpaper samples. Fleur used some old, never read books from her bookshelf. (Photo 1).

Step 2:  Lay your first book out on top of your Resene wallpaper and cut the wallpaper to size, leaving a margin of a couple of centimetres. (Photo 2).

Step 3:  Cut the corners at an angle so that they fold better. Also cut out notches around the spine. (Photo 3).

Step 4:  Print out the words ‘home sweet home’ and transfer these onto the book spines. To do this, Fleur used two methods. For the yellow wallpaper, Fleur taped the word ‘sweet’ to the back of the Resene wallpaper, held the paper up to a window so that light came through and traced around the word with a pen. (Photo 4).

Step 5:  Using a very small paintbrush paint in the word with Resene Blue Diamond. (Photo 5).

Step 6:  Once the paint is dry you can wrap the book with the wallpaper. You can use glue to hold it in place permanently, but if you made your margins big enough, the paper cover doesn’t need gluing (Photo 6).

Step 7:  For the purple wallpaper, Fleur couldn’t see through it to use the same tracing technique as she did for the yellow paper. Instead, Fleur taped the word ‘home’ to the front of the paper and used a ballpoint pen to trace around it, pushing firmly. (Photo 7).

Step 8:  Remove the ‘home’ word and you will be left with an indentation of the word which you can then fill in with paint. Fleur used Resene Apache. (Photos 8 and 9).

Step 9:  Once the paint is dry, stack the three books on top of each other and tie with string. (Finished project).

Top tip:  Try another combination of words to suit your home. Or you can also use this idea to decorate journals to gift to someone else using their favourite Resene colours.

Project and images by Fleur Thorpe. August 2021.