Book Clock {Tutorial}

For someone who is as obsessed with books, like I am, you can't beat this piece of time-telling art.

It has graced my bedroom for months, showing off my bookishness, geekiness, and craftiness (and all of that adds up to awesomeness, yes? lol, now I sound like my brothers).

You can see more of my Destroyable Book projects {here}, and more of my DIY bedroom decorating {here}.

You will need:

• a Destroyable Book
• and Xacto or utility knife
• a clock movement (buy one from the store or gut an old clock)
• Mod Podge or other glue

This tutorial will be mostly pictorial, since much of it is quite redundant to the Secret Book Box that I made recently. If you are confused about any step, please refer to the post on how to make a hollow book, or leave a comment.

Gather your materials

Figure out where you want the clock to be situated.

The next few pictures show me hollowing out a hole in the book. These are the same steps used to create the Secret Book Box. In just a few words, I cover the cover and a few pages with plastic (from a shopping bag), glue the edges of the book pages together, and use an X-acto knife to cut out the hole.

(You also have the option of gluing after you have cut out the hollow portion. You can glue from the inside of  of the book so that from the outside, the book doesn't look like it has any glue on it.)

If the pictures didn't make sense, the instructions for making a hollow book are {here}.

Note: I had some difficulty aligning my clock with my hole, as you will see. If you run into this problem, you can simply make the hole larger to allow more wiggle room. No one said that the hole has to be the size and shape of your clock movement!

Make a hole where the clock hands will go. I did this without any fancy tools; just lots of muscle, a stray nail to poke the hole, and a pencil to enlarge it.

The next few photos show how I "cleaned up" the hollow part of the book:

At this point, I realized that the hole in the cover, the hollow part of the book, and the clock movement did not line up. Ooops.

Rather than cut out more of the book to scoot the clock movement over to the right by a few centimenters, I just made the hole in the cover bigger.

You won't believe how long it took me to figure out how to screw the clock movement together! I was having a totally "duh" day... In case any of you are having such a day, here is a photo to show you how it is done. :)

Because I had to adjust the size of my hole, it was too big and did not look very handsome. I decided to cover it up-- I just used a paper punch to punch out a page from the book.

Ta-dah! A finished Book Clock!

As you can see here, I added some brown paint to the clock hands. It helps them stand out more from a distance.

I might be something of an anomaly as far as sixteen year old girls go-- I can actually tell time on an analog clock without any problem.

However, if you want to mark off the numbers on the clock, feel free to!

You can use those flat thumbtacks (if you get the white ones, you can even decorate them with Sharpies). You could use number stickers.... miniature paper mustaches.... whatever you want!

P.S. Were you inspired to make something using the tutorial? Please leave a comment, I'd love to see it!