a fresh steele: Don't Judge a Book by It's Cover

Wednesday, January 11

Don't Judge a Book by It's Cover

Just when you think everything is in place you find something that can be placed elsewhere. After a major winter cleaning I decided to put all my cookbooks in my kitchen cabinets instead of being on display on my living room bookcase. After all the cookbooks were nicely put away in their new home I was left with a semi-empty bookcase that needed a major face-lift.

Before Picture (Taken with an iPhone)

The cookbooks in their new home.

Initially, I had all the books arranged by color to keep things pretty. The colorful arrangement that worked before was not going to work with all the cookbooks in their new home. I had a bunch of mismatched books and chatskis on my bookcase that was quite the new eyesore. Then out of nowhere came the memory of a blog posting on The Precious Little Things in Life blog I read regarding bookcase arrangements. While an article in Real Simple started me on organizing by color that blog posting gave me the inspiration for my current arrangement.

Bookshelf complete, for now.

If you have not already guessed by the pictures, I decided to butcher paper wrap all of my books! I must say butcher paper became difficult to acquire and to my surprise whenever I asked for butcher paper at a store I found some very confused people. Only after explaining "brown wrapping paper" did I get the, "No, we do not carry that item." My trip around town finally lead me to Office Depot and their trusty packaging section with plenty of butcher paper a.k.a. postal wrap according to Office Depot.

Once the wrapping began I suddenly realized - wait a minute - what is the best way to wrap a book? Trusty Google lead me to the Daring Book for Girls website for a wonderful example. Now with the directions on how to best wrap the books, I got started. When I got started I was initially nervous it was not going to look good, then I started to really like what I was seeing. After wrapping my first 10 books I had to face the facts - what is the best way to label the books? I tried a black Sharpie, silver paint pen and then finally a gold paint pen. The winner was using the gold paint pen to write the author and title of the book on the spine of all the books.

Like most of my projects I only figure out half way through I should have taken a before picture. Please excuse the pictures of the original bookcase arrangement... it's a good excuse to get the dogs onto the blog.