Back to jewelry-making! I bookmarked this Craftster tutorial on how to make a library stack necklace a while ago and finally had the time to get back to crafting. Plus it gave me a chance to go shopping at Salvation Army for supplies and other goodies.

Materials/Tools:

• Leather scraps or felt
• Old book with yellowed pages (mine was from the 80s!)
• Head pin
• Chain
• Clasp
• Jump rings or eye pins
• Sharp scissors (paper and fabric)
• Ruler
• Needle or piercing tool
• Wire cutters
• Round nose pliers

The tutorial suggests using leather from old handbags, but I didn’t have any on hand and the ones from Salvation Army were $4-8.  Instead, I bought a bag of leather scraps from Hobby Lobby. I also found red felt that looked like patterned leather.

Cut out 0.75 x 0.75 inch pages from the book. Try to use pages with little text. Then cut the leather/felt book cover to 1 x 2.25 inches or size it to a stack of pages (I cut the leather first and ended up having to trim all my paper to make it fit inside the book cover 😦 ).

With a needle or piercing tool, pierce each book through the middle (lots of elbow grease required for using the needle!). Add each book to a 1 3/8 inch or longer head pin. I found it easiest to add one side of the book cover, then the pages, then bending the head pin to pull in the back cover, and finally bending the head pin back to its original position. Optional: glue down any loose ends if desired.

Using round nose pliers, wrap the end of the head pin into a circle. Add a jump ring to attach the library stack to a necklace chain (I used a 30 inch chain and cut eye pins instead of jump rings because I didn’t have any on hand).

I really like my new necklace but of course, it took longer than expected—especially cutting out pages. Estimated project time: 2-3 hours spread over two evenings.

It’s kinda ironic that I don’t even like to read. 🙂