Haunted House Book

I have made "house" books before like this Christmas one.

This time I wanted to build a setting to go with the house book so I added a box and a little platform.

This way I have lots of possibilities and the book can still look like a house on its own.























MATERIALS REQUIRED:

- a small box, I used a soap box
- some pieces of coruggated cardboard
- paper
- 2 large jump or O rings, you could also use binder clips, or ribbon
- paint
- pencil crayons
- 3 pipe cleaners
- coloured paper
- sharpies, white gel pen
- glue, scissors, hole punch
- little Halloween embellishments, optional

PROCEDURE:

Take your box and cut the tabs off the open end.

Cut a piece of corrugated cardboard for the base of your box.  Leave some space on the sides for your scene.




Cut 2 pieces of cardboard for your front and back cover.  You want it to fit in your box.  Cut them a few inches taller than the box.  This will be where you attach the "roof" sections.





Cut another 2 pieces of cardboard for the roof sections.  You want them wider than your covers.  You also want to cut them long enough that they will cover the cut end of your box when the book is standing.

Paint your pieces, you can also cover them with coloured paper.





When the paint is dry you can paint the backs of your covers and roof sections or you glue some nice coordinating paper.

Take some coloured paper.  Here I'm using some extra painted paper from my stash and some coloured cardstock.

Cut a bunch of shingle shapes, like a pocket shape.  Starting at the bottom glue your shingles on. Have them overhang on the bottom a bit.

Trim any shingles that are extending past the sides.

Cut some pages for your book, same size as the covers.

Using a hole punch, punch holes in your roof sections, the covers, and all the pages.  I mark them with a pencil as I go so they will all line up.


Take a large jump or O ring, (you could also use small binder clips, wire, or even ribbon), and thread all the pages on.  Do one whole side and then the other.  Close up the rings or tie the ribbon leaving some slack for the pages to be able to turn.

Now it's time to decorate the box.  You can also decorate the covers at the same time if you wish.


Draw out little windows and a door.  Paint and add color.

Cut them out and glue to the box.


You can add some spiderwebs with a white gel pen.





Put some glue on the bottom of the box and place into position on the cardboard base you painted.

Add some embellishments.  Here I added a skull bead from a dollar store bracelet, some footprints that I punched out.

I made a tree by twisting 2 pipe cleaners together.  I took a third one and cut it in pieces and twisted them on for extra branches.  I added a little spider webbing and 2 plastic spiders.


I glued it into place with a glue gun.

Add some grass.  I also made a gravestone out of cardboard and glued that into place.

Take a piece of wire and wrap around a pencil.  Slide it off.  I cut a little bat from some craft foam but you could also use cardstock.



Attach to the wire with a little glue.






Feed the wire thru one of the holes for the binding and twist into place.

Either hand letter or print out some text from the computer and add a title to your book.  I painted mine orange.

Now you can fill the pages of your book.

That's it, a cute haunted house book.

This will be my only post this week as I am off to the Early Childhood Education Conference in Edmonton.  If you are registered in my Book Artistry workshop you will be learning lots of neat book forms including this one.

Hope to see you there!