How to make an Altered Book for Halloween

Here's a fun project for you. It comes with a warning though, once you make one your imagination will go crazy and it's hard to stop.  I got this idea from Pinterest.  Well actually my Sister did.  About two months ago, (she starts early)I saw her making them and I just had to make my own.  Here's a link to the source for the Arachnid book.

So how do you do it?  Paper towels and watered down glue. Can you believe it.  That's what gives the cool creepy wrinkled texture.  Of course you could use Mod Podge instead of glue if you have it.

You don't even need an old book you can use whatever hard back book you have.  Just tea stain or brush the pages with paint to make them look old. 

For the Arachnid Book I used a Dollar Store spider that was flat on the bottom.  I hot glued it to the book then used the glue mixture to decoupage the paper towel on. If you don't have a spider you can create one by using paper towels or whatever you can think of to get the shape.

 

Let it completely dry (it takes at least a day) then add whatever embellishments you want and paint with craft paint.  
 
To make it more convincing when you open the book I searched for a spider image and found it on The Graphics Fairy Blog (click here for image).  Then I googled the definition of spider, combined the two in a Word document and printed it off.  Attach with spray glue. 

For the creepy eye I used a plastic eyeball and broke it in half.  To make the eye lid use more paper towels and glue. The detail on the spine of the eye book is made by gluing on cardboard squares. For the look above make lines with hot glue.

 

Seriously the skies the limit.  For more inspiration check out my Halloween Pinterest Board.  

I really wanted to make one out of a cookbook and title in potions and spells but Hubby didn't want me to ruin our cookbooks.  I don't know what he means by ruin do you? ;)