If the title of this post sounded incredibly boring, bear with me, I swear it’s not! it’s actually unbelievably cute and has led to my bookshelf becoming much more attractive. I decided to DIY dust jackets for my bookshelf and I love the end result!
You are reading: How to make dust jackets for books
When I moved into my bachelor apartment in November, I was hell-bent on taking care of the space. I’m not a student anymore, so I don’t have an apartment full of my parents’ discarded stuff, random repossessed parts, and junk from my childhood that I had to hold on to because I couldn’t afford new stuff. my goal was to make this apartment different. I wanted it to reflect my taste and what has evolved to become my style.
I got rid of a lot of stuff and then thought a lot about what I wanted in the new space. then I carefully selected new items and gradually bought them and incorporated them into the design. I was pretty ruthless in my cleaning, but I never seemed to be able to get rid of my harry potter books. I loved them as a kid and haven’t read them in a long time, but I often quote movies/books with friends so I have a bit of a soft spot for them.
I had talked about making DIY dust jackets for them for a while, but could never decide what kind of paper to use. she didn’t want to just cover them up on a single sheet of paper and have them lose all resemblance to the original book spines. I wanted something that was easy, inexpensive, and wouldn’t force me to part with books. Finally one day I realized that I could use the pack of colored aid paper I got at school to create my DIY dust jackets. I have used this paper for other projects as seen here. By using this paper in combination with plain white printer paper, I could use up old supplies I had on hand (something I love to do). Plus, I was able to choose from over 400 colors and pick a color palette to match. the biggest stroke of genius i had was designing the spines to look similar to the original harry potter spines. the bookshelf started out looking like this:
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Because my books are on the shelf and you can only see the spines, I was only concerned that they be colored. it was fine with the rest of the dust jacket being white. if you want your entire book jacket to be covered with colored paper, you may need to purchase some larger sheets!
This is how I created my DIY dust jackets and made my bookshelf look 100x better:
materials:
- plain white printer paper – 8.5×11
- exact knife
- rubber cutting mat
- colored paper in about 12 shades – 4×6 (see notes above for size)
- mask tape
- pens/markers (optional)
steps:
- Take a piece of printer paper and cut it in half with your exacto knife
- Flip the pieces around so that the cut edges are facing the outside
- Then pick 4 colours of paper and arrange them in the order that you want them to appear on the spine of the book
- Measure the spine of the book and add at least 2 inches to that size. This becomes your length.
- Next measure how wide you want the first band of colour to be. My first band was about half an inch wide because I was trying to recreate the look of the Harry Potter spines. This is your width.
- Take your l x w measurements and cut your first piece of coloured paper to that size. Note that the length of each piece will stay the same for each colour. Only the width will change depending on how big each section of colour should be.
- Take you piece of coloured paper and flip it over so the wrong side is facing up.
- Line the printer paper up with the edge of the coloured paper and tape down on both sides. It should look something like this once you have a few colours done:
- Continue to cut your next 3 pieces of coloured paper and tape them one below the other trying to line them up as best as possible. To make dust jackets that resemble the Harry Potter covers you can follow my template below. The measurements can vary slightly, though!
- Once you have all of your pieces of coloured paper securely taped in place, pick up the cover and tuck it under the top cover of the book. Holding your cover down, gently guide it around the book and tuck into the back cover as well, taking care to make sure it has been wrapped snuggly.
- Repeat for remaining books!
It’s a simple project, but it makes the bookshelf look much more cohesive. It didn’t cost me a penny either, which is my favorite type of project! I chose not to write on the book spines because I just wanted them to look neat and tidy, but that’s something I might change in the future. I also love how the dust jacket design continues to pay a subtle homage to the original color block harry potter book spines 🙂
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This is a great way to make your space look cohesive by slightly modifying things you already have. It’s such an easy and inexpensive little project, but I think it makes the space look so much more visually appealing.
I’m so happy with the results of these that I think I’ll have to think about making more DIY jackets for my dan brown books.
Would you give these a try to help heal your space? I’d love to hear!
xo, tess.
Let’s stay friends!
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