Remember a few weeks ago when I posted about my mini kitchen makeover that included all sorts of blog standards like a chalkboard wall, a farmhouse table, and Revere Pewter walls? Well. I decided to keep it up by doing a craft project involving a banner AND book pages!

And I can totally see why everyone wants to make tiny little banners and things out of book pages, because OMG. This is the most adorable thing I’ve ever done. In a spooky sort of way, I mean.

Here. I couldn’t decide, so I made two pictures with words for this one:

I didn’t know which one to lead with, because this is like two projects in one! More for your money: that’s what you get here at Boxy Colonial.

Anyway. As evidenced by the raven-embellished planter boxes we made last week, we’re gearing up for an Edgar Allan Poe inspired Halloween around these parts. Well, mostly just The Raven. Next year we’re getting all Tell Tale Heart and ripping up floor boards! Not really.

I have a whole Halloween display on my buffet with a couple of other crafty-ish projects to show you later this week, but today you only get to see my Halloween tree. It will take me long enough to talk about that part. BELIEVE me.

I found this tree made out of twisted black metal at the thrift store a few weeks ago. Judging from that price tag, I paid $3.03 for it:

Then it sat around for awhile and I tried to decide what to do with it. It has these round things on it that I assume are supposed to hold candles. But I didn’t put candles on it.

Then I spotted these mini purple lights at Target the other day:

$3.50, so we’re up to $6.53 invested in this thing. I’ll just go ahead and say, so that I don’t forget later, that the only other thing I bought was some twine for something like $1.25, so we’ll round up and call it an $8 project.

I wrapped the lights around the tree and was pleased with the results. And I already had the beginnings of a banner plan swirling around in my head, but I wanted something to hang from it, too. Then, when I was going through the Halloween box in the basement, I found this!

Not the orange kitty, the other thing. I have no idea why I bought this to start with; I can’t remember ever doing anything with it. But there it was, festooned with black and orangey gold plastic balls.

So I disassembled it and hung the balls on the tree. And stood back to admire the results. Now all it needed was a tiny little banner.

Ideally I would have cut up some Poe for this, but I didn’t have any handy that I didn’t mind destroying. So instead I went with this falling apart copy of All the King’s Men (don’t worry; I have another, not falling apart copy), a book I like to refer to as my favorite book that I’ve never managed to make it all the way through. Ahem.

It was not a very spooky book, but that Robert Penn Warren did have a bit of a potty mouth, so no one should look too carefully at the text behind my nevermore letters.

I just drew a little banner shape and then folded the pages so that I could cut a bunch out at once:

I just did the letters freehand, figuring it would not be too arduous since they’re so tiny:

I fretted for awhile about how I was going to string the letters together. I kept thinking I’d need to punch holes in them and put the string through that and that the book pages were too fragile to handle it….and then I remembered: what can do anything? Scotch tape can do anything! I bought the aforementioned black twine:

And then I flipped it over, ready to be dazzled by my own handiwork.

Umm. This is why I don’t sew. Exceptionally poor spatial reasoning skills. Fortunately, they all came off without ripping.

Much better!

Then I put it on my tree, and it looked so beautiful I almost cried. I love it. I’m going to decorate everything in my house with a tiny banner. Like on my kitchen chairs, I’ll just put tiny banners that say “chair.” Or whatever.