Ballard-inspired covered books with wax seals ~ Madigan Made { simple DIY ideas }

Madigan made... knock-off covered books.

This is not your average book knock-off.

Why?

Well, all over blogland, I am seeing people knocking off these Ballard and Pottery Barn "antique" book bundles.

They look great, but I was recently inspired by a different set of books I saw at Ballard. Of course, Ballard doesn't sell the books I like!

Remember how I showed you my Ballard inspired bookcase on Monday?

Part of this bookcase inspiration came from books I saw in Ballard's fall 2010 catalog.

Look at the books in these shelves:

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I loved how the cream and tan covered books provided some consistency and repeated color throughout the bookcases. I also loved the wax seals on each of them, too.

These books were a pretty simple knock-off.

First, I gathered all my books (including a couple sets of books I recently picked up at the thrift store).

I covered each book with either white or cream paper. (wrapping paper, card stock or linen resume paper)

For each book I cut out three pieces of paper and then attached them to the books using a glue stick. (one piece around each cover and one around the spine)

Covering all those books took time! So I did it in chunks over a couple nights while I got caught up on my DVR backlog of The Nate Berkus Show and HGTV. :D

I was going to buy wax seal stickers but then realized they were kinda pricey... for stickers.

I thought: Why not make them myself? So I did.

To make the stickers I used gold and tan card stock, stamps, embossing powder, an embossing pad and my heat gun (I LOVE using that thing!).

I first cut circles out using my crafty cutting machine.

I had hoped to just stamp the paper using the embossing pad and use the embossing powder on the stamped image. I wanted it to give a textured image, similar to a real wax seal.

But the powder did not stick cleanly to just that stamped area.

So I decided to stamp an image onto the circle with a colored regular stamp.

Then, I pressed the embossing pad over the whole surface of the paper circle.

I sprinkled embossing powder over the circle. The powder stuck to the embossing stamp ink. Then, I carefully melted the powder using my heat gun.

After the first application, the embossing powder did not completely cover the surface of the paper. So I repeated the steps above 2 more times until I had a circle of paper completely covered in a coating of embossing powder.

It took three coats total to cover the circle.

I ran the paper circles through my Xyron machine to make them into stickers.

Then I just attached the embossed circles to each book!

You also could just glue the circles to the books, too.

Now, up close, these paper circles only vaguely look like wax seals. For example, this technique would NOT be good replacement for wax seals on your wedding invitation.

But from a distance and behind glass on a bookcase,

I think these "wax" seal stickers look pretty good.