To fill in a tricky empty corner in our home library we hung an enlarged framed book page that we created featuring a favorite quote.
Do you have a spot in your home that you don’t quite know what to do with? For us it was a corner in our library. We are closing in on having our library finished, short of our flooring but that is a rant for another day. The library is not huge so we are cautious of making it feel overcrowded with too much “stuff”. For awhile we had our traveling tree filling up this corner.
I call it our traveling tree because I bought this tree back when I was decorating my first “grown-up” apartment. I still like the tree but since we moved into our house I have not found the right spot for it. So I move it around from room to room, corner to corner to act as a temporary fill in for empty spaces. But I never like how it looks there so it ends up moving on to the next empty spot once I find something better to replace it with.
Poor, sad traveling tree, maybe someday it will find a place to call its forever home.
It wasn’t until I moved the tree that I realized how much I didn’t like it in that corner because it was too much next to the love seat. While browsing Pinterest one evening I stumbled across an example of a large framed book page.
A lightbulb went off. What would be better in a library than a large framed book page? It would be just big enough to fill up the corner without looking too crowded.
I remembered that sitting in our closet unused was a huge frame Brent found in the IKEA reject section for $5 that looks perfectly fine. Ah, we love when a project that is a solution to an empty space costs us almost nothing and is easy to quickly put into action.
Our Framed Book Page Project
The hardest part was determining what page in what book out of the hundreds of books we have to use. We sat in our library and flipped through tons of books and then I remembered a line about perspective that I really liked from the Magician’s Nephew (part of The Chronicles of Narnia series). “For what you see and hear depends on where you are standing: it also depends on what sort of person you are”.
The line was buried in the page which was all text so Brent and I decided to get creative and create our own fake book page featuring this quote so it would be more prominent. I really liked the title page for the chapter it was in so I scanned that page of the book and opened it up in Illustrator.
I created a new document that was the size we wanted to print so that would fit in our large frame and all the text and graphics would be the right size and resolution. Then I created our new fake book page by adding the the graphic from the title page and typing the book title at the top, chapter title in the middle, the quote we wanted to feature and included the page number at the bottom.
We needed all the text a lot larger so it would be visible and easy to read. We then had it printed, cut it to size, popped it in the frame and hung it up.
The whole project took us about two hours from finding the quote to hanging it on the wall and cost us $5 for the frame and maybe $2 to have it printed.
We had two copies printed just in case we messed one up while cutting it to fit in the frame. While we love building huge detailed projects, we are quite fond of these quick Sunday afternoon decor projects too.
We think a framed book page is the perfect solution to that tricky corner and addition to the library. Plus, since I tend to have commitment issues when it comes to decor in our home, I love pieces that are flexible and easy to switch out. If Brent or I find a new favorite quote from a book we can inexpensively change out the book page in the frame, keeping our library feeling fresh.
PIN THIS PROJECT
