My daughter, like her father, loves to make shit. She’ll cut up anything, glue it together, and call it an airplane faster than I can boil a box of Kraft Macaroni & Cheese (7 Minutes BTW). When we were building the house she and I would spend time at my moms ‘crafting’. If I had to explain where I get my creativity from it would definitely, without a doubt, be from my mother. Where she got it from? I’ll have to ask…
Daughter and I were wandering through our local dollar store, like you do, and I happened upon a section of books. Books that had longed for the day where they may be placed atop a Barnes & Noble book shelf instead to be tossed aside and sold in bulk to a dollar store for who knows why. I spot the book that I want to destroy, and I utter the following:
Father – “Want to make book you can keep stuff in?”
A conversation that has been greatly exaggerated but is surprisingly accurate.
Daughter – “Yes of course! I will most certainly hide things in it you are looking for when we are late for school.”
My daughter loves this idea. She’s always liked playing with little boxes or tiny bags she can tuck things into; Like three Mini-figures of Rey we couldn’t find for several weeks – for example. We chose the book “The Clinton Tapes” by Taylor Branch. No, we didn’t read it.
I started this project sometime during the fall of 2016. I started by clamping the book together and gluing the pages to each other. I placed wax paper between the pages I wanted to keep and the glued pages so that they didn’t stick together. This book has an unnecessarily stylized “roughing” technique applied to the ends of the pages and made it difficult to make sure you got all the nooks and crannies while gluing. You’ll want to get in there with a thick brush and a shit load of glue. Using a very sharp Xacto Knife I peeled away page, after page, after page of glorious William Jefferson Clinton content. After what seemed like several weeks of work I had decided I had enough and called it off. The paper was just too thick. The Clintons’ spared no expense on this paper. The project would have to wait until I found a better way to cut through. Fast forward to Summer 2017. An extremely handsome and very handy friend of mine had an idea on how we could finish this. He suggested using a RYOBI JobPlus with multi-tool attachment in order to hack our way through. It worked like magic. It also created a lot of Clinton dust.
By the time I revisited this project, the Myst 25th Anniversary Kickstarter was in full swing. I had shared this with my daughter and she had expressed interest in having her own “Myst” book. Did she though? I thought it may be fun to decorate this book in such a way that it might be Myst worthy.
Chose some paint: Cocoa Bean for the base, French Wine for a splash of color, and 14k Gold for the fancy stuff.
Boy that is brown. I taped off the area where I wanted to paint it red and gave it a few coats.
The French Wine and some gold trim going on. I really enjoyed how this started to look. The gold makes it pop.
The finished product… I’ve tried a few times to stencil on the word ‘Myst’ or our last name but it just isn’t coming out how I want it. Any suggestions on how to best stencil?
Winter 2020 update
While browsing the r/myst subreddit I came across a post where a fan of the series wanted to gift their mother the games of the series but wanted to make it a little more fun! Click here for more info on that project
During their build I saw that they had a great way to stencil the MYST logo onto the book using a printed stencil and some painters tape. So I gave it a shot and it came out pretty darn great! Layering a piece of painters tape down onto the book, layering the stencil over it and taping that down I was able to accurately cut out each letter and in turn cut into the painters tape below to make a sticky stencil right onto the book itself. Applying layers of the 14k Gold paint over that and we get this: