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This is the fifth in a series of posts about designing
and building the wall art for my living room.
Read the first post about how I got the idea here,
the second post about building the frame here,
the third post about buying the books here,
and the fourth post about taking apart the books here.

Previously in our story, I took apart all the books for my project.

Hmmmmmmm . . . how am I going to attach them to the frame? Originally, I considered some type of glue. However, I needed something to secure several pages of the books so gravity wouldn’t pull them off the frame. Then I remembered the book wall where I got this idea in the first place: they used tacks.

Cork Board & Thumb Tacks

My solution? Cork board. I found this roll of 1/4-inch thick cork board at the hardware store.

Quarter-inch thick cork board that I glued to the inside of the frame.

The cork board was thin enough that I was able to cut it neatly with scissors to fit the frame. I glued it down using wood glue and a lot of heavy books to keep it in place while it dried.

The cork board was thin and my book pieces were less than 1/8-inch thick. I found these stubby thumb tacks also at the hardware store – just the right length!

Short, stubby thumb tacks to secure books to cork board.

The other beauty of using cork board? I could move books around if I didn’t like how it looked.

I used the tacks to secure the books by pulling back a few pages and hiding the tacks underneath. I wanted some of the pages to pull away from the fame to give it texture.

Hiding the tacks.

Single-Pagers

A few pieces were single pages. Here, tacks wouldn’t work. I still wanted to be able to move pages around, so I used rubber cement.

Single pages: rubber cement to the rescue.

In case you were wondering, my husband picked this book out.

Mind the Gap

What to do about these little spaces?

These little spaces result because I didn’t want to layer the books in neat little rows.

Baby gaps that need to be filled.

I could have used extra pages from the books I already had, but that would be just. too. easy.

I had something else lying around the house, waiting to be used:

Travel books to the rescue!

Travel books are great to craft with because they become out of date very quickly.

I sliced out memorable pages to use.

Removing some memorable pages.

What do I mean by memorable? That page above has the boat trip that the husband and I took on our honeymoon.

I’m so sentimental I surprise myself sometimes.

I used several travel pages and filled the rest of the gaps.

Filling the gap.

Is that a light at the end of the tunnel?

Update: Visit Part 6 – the Finale

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