Recycled book cover glitter numbers (cake topper)

Here is an example of a project that I thought would be simple, but turned into something much more complicated and time consuming than I would have imagined.  But it is an adorable cake topper, isn't it?

To start with, I purchased a 'get rich quick' book from the second hand store for a whopping $0.25.  It had a dust cover, and looked brand new.  I removed the dust cover to find a beautiful green hard cover made of heavy chipboard.  This is why I purchased the book.  My inner bookworm did cringe at the thought of chopping up a book, but there is no way I could buy two nice pieces of chipboard and a 325 page pad of scrap paper for the same price.  And since the book was obviously trash anyways, it wasn't so bad to chop it up.

To start with I cut the numbers out of black paper to see how they looked.  I used my Cricut machine with the Sure Cuts A Lot program, and the Curlz font.  It took me all of 3 minutes to complete.   Easy.  Next I traced the numbers onto my book cover.  This took under two minutes.  My project seemed to be going so well.

I spent about 15 minutes trying to cut through the chipboard with an exact-o knife - it didn't happen.  If I had a band saw this would have been so easy to cut out.  I did have my dremel handy, so at first I tried cutting it out with a drill bit.  Is anyone surprised to hear that didn't work?  I finally tried out the cutting wheel, and spent the better part of an hour cutting my shape out with the dremel thick cutting wheel.  (The dremel was off when I posed for the photo.  If you try this bits of dust and scrap will fly up into your face - I recommend goggles and possibly a dust mask, or at least a t-shirt pulled over your nose and mouth.)



There were some places that the dremel wheel couldn't fit into without cutting off something else.  For these areas I pulled out a hacksaw blade and used it to hand saw out the inner areas.  When I finished with that I trimmed it further into shape using my exact-o knife.  I then sanded down the rough spots and rounded the edges.  The book cover looked lovely at this point, and would be nice for other applications.  (In fact, I plan on making some jewelry from the scraps.)

I covered up the beautiful cover with some black paint.  I let the paint dry for about an hour before moving on to the glitter glue.  I wish I could have left the cover alone though, with maybe a coat of clear sealer to protect the raw edges.

The last step is to spread the numbers with glue, and apply the glitter.  I actually had a bottle of glitter glue sitting in my stash (it came with something else I bought.)  I sprinkled a thick amount of glitter onto the glue and left it to dry several hours.  I then applied the glitter and glue to the back.

Since this was intended as a cake topper, and the glitter isn't edible, I sprayed a light coat of clear spray paint onto it.  If it would have been up to me, I would have used several coats of the clear paint to help seal the glitter.  Beautiful glitter numbers!  I think a little girl would love to see her name hanging on the wall in pretty pink and purple glitter letters, don't you?