DIY Anthropologie Library Letters

Greetings Blogosphere and thanks so much for dropping by Pine + Palm! I figured what better way to start a blog than with a good old fashioned DIY tutorial on the greatest thing on Earth: BOOKS. Over the summer I was in my favorite "get creative ideas and knock them off" store (also known as Anthropologie) and I found these beauties:

WHAT. BOOK LETTERS. GENIUS!  (For the whole alphabet, check out the Anthropologie Library Letters) I fell so in love with this idea that I decided that I immediately needed to make one for the library in our new home (at the time a huge bare room). To start, these books are none other than old Reader's Digest Condensed Books (check out Reader's Digest Condensed Books on Amazon). I've ordered a few off of Amazon with pretty designs but to start, my sister Carly found a really pretty one at a Goodwill for $1.99, a good place to start! For all you interested Bibliophiles, this was the 1983, Vol: 5 Edition that featured abridged versions of Godplayer/ The Suitcases/ The Time of the Hunter's Moon/ Stalking Point...oooook. Voila!

I started out by marking off the areas I wanted to cut out on the book itself in pencil :

Mistakes in the "cut-out" zones are allowed!

Then off the the garage to have my husband Jason start chopping! I would have cut the thing up myself but he was already out in the freezing cold garage, wielding a saw so I decided to let him in on the fun. First we created a pretty low budget set-up using blocks of scrap wood to attach the book to with clamps

We decided that the easiest tool to use would be a jigsaw. You could also use a Scroll Saw (in which case you wouldn't really need to low-budget wood piling) but the jigsaw was out and Jason was feeling confident so why not?

A picture of confidence

It took him a little time but I think the end result is fantastic and this was cutting a bit more detail than the original library letters. A word to the wise, the skinnier the book the better! Now I know all you serious readers are raising your eyebrows and saying, "skinny books? ME? *scoff* Never!" know, I know. We are talking about condensed books in the first place though, they seem to be the pretty ones and I guess we shouldn't feel so bad about cutting them up anyways. But back to my original point, the thicker the books get, the more difficult they get to cut straight edges (especially when you're doing more intricate curved areas). So now Carly has a beautiful C for her new apartment and I have some pretty ones of my choosing from Amazon on the way to play with for the future library! 

C is for Classy!