Sorry for the late post! I completely spaced it yesterday. However, it turned out for the best. According to Holiday Insights, today is Book Lover's Day. Upcoming days include Lazy Day (tomorrow), Left Hander's Day (the 13th), Bad Poetry Day (the 18th), and Frankenstein Day (the 30th) -- among many others. Craftzine has dubbed it Quirky Crafts Month, and under the Quirky Crafts tag there are some delightful projects.

Since it's Book Lover's Day, let's look at books. I am not a scrapbooker, per se, but I love to make books of clippings. Generally I find a nice hardcover blank book and paste things into it from magazines, catalogs, pamphlets, the newspaper - whatever I find that's relevant. I may also copy things out by hand. I am a terrible paper packrat. I have three books for recipes (plus a binder for full-size sheets), one for other household- and toiletry-related clippings, one for craft ideas, one for fashion design ideas, one for local tourist attractions (very handy when I have visitors!), one for gardening, and a number that hold memorabilia of past travel.

A few of the books are spiral-bound, which is convenient if you want them to lie flat, and the recipe books are commercially designed for recipes. The local tourism is a small-scale three-ring binder (by Day Runner or Day-Timer or some such), which allows me to keep it in order for finding things easily, and not have to guess how many blank pages to leave in the middle for future expansion.

I have in the past also made gift books, which also start as blank hardcovers (or sometimes nice softcovers, with a leatherette feel) and into which I either write longhand or paste in typed material. I put in poems, recipes, book excerpts and other quotations, jokes, and other nonsense. Those books are significantly smaller than my clipping books. They have to be, or I would never finish them!

For more professional-looking books you can turn to on-demand publishing, where you create a pdf and they print the book. After living there for four months, I made a book about New Zealand for my grandmother, with information about the culture and area, descriptions of my adventures there, and lots of photos. I used Lulu, but there are many options.

Of course one may also construct the book itself, not just its contents. I'm sure I will do this eventually, though I haven't yet. However, it doesn't stop me from finding the online resources! Making Books with Children has a number of free project instructions. About.com has instructions for a paper bag scrapbook which could also be done with children. The motherlode is at Craft Stew, a long list of links to bookbinding instructions grouped by technique. If you just want inspiration, LiveJournal has an active Handmade Book Community where people post their finished works.

Finally, if you would like some interesting and beautiful "unmade" books, do an image search on "altered books."