Home libraries are personal spaces that interior designers have yet to catch up with.
The accessories recommended for a reading nook are – too often – stereotypical of the age-old mental images of big study rooms used for storage and retrieval.
Credit: @number131 vis Instagram
To make a home library cute, so much so that you’d want to sleep in your reading chair, crafts are a saving grace.
There’s nothing more personal for such a personal space than accessories you make yourself.
11 Crafty Activities to Transform a Sterile Storage Zone into a Cute Home Library
1. Sew Decorative Cushions for Cozy Comforts
Without a cozy reading chair, you’ll fetch a book and head to the sofa, surrounded by distractions. A cozy reading chair is a staple.
Nothing screams cozy and cute more than something you make yourself.
Rather than spending a fortune on bespoke cushions, stitch your own together. There’s a much wider variety of fabrics, patterns, and colors to choose from.
Besides, if it’s a toss-up between two fabrics, you can make your cushion reversible.
2. Color Coordinate with Handmade Book Covers
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Brightly colored binders on paperback books lining shelves are a far cry from cute. Color coordinate your books by stitching book covers together that match the tone you’re going for.
Don’t fancy sewing? Use wallpaper. Most don’t tear easily, and if you’ve recently decorated, it’s a simple way to upcycle off-cuts.
3. DIY Book Sleeves
Credit: Martha Milne
Read on your travels? Protect your books with a padded sleeve.
Set it down on your side table when you settle in, then when you’re packing for a trip, slip your latest read inside, and pack away safely in a suitcase, your purse, or a laptop bag.
You’ll feel less anxious about the pages creasing, binders cracking, or heaven forbid, dropping the book in a puddle.
You can wash fabric book sleeves.
You can’t wash paper.
4. Personalize your Books with Custom Designed Bookplates
Credit: Paula Kuitenbrouwer
For those books you adore, have read several times and aim to read again, make it even more special the next time you open the cover with a custom bookplate. (ex libris).
Ever remember being gifted a book with a special insert inside to write your name? “This book belongs to ___”. It can be that simple, or you could hand draw and color a decorative design.
Take the creative approach and personalize your most cherished books. The ones you’d find it hard to forgive a friend for being so careless as to leave it within reach of their 6-month puppy!
Use the bookplate to lay claim to it as yours and add notes to anyone you lend the book to – no highlighting, use Post-it notes if you must annotate, and enjoy a cuppa as you read, but be careful of spillages.
5. Add Ambiance with a Mason Jar Lamp
Nothing says cute more than fairy lights. A mason jar is just the thing.
Secure the lid to the underside of a shelf, fill the jar with LED fairy lights, screw that to the lid, and you have yourself a cute nightlight.
If you want to get super creative, stencil some designs onto the jar. You could illuminate the shape of a butterfly, songbird, or shapes of stars.
6. Fabric Bunting
A little décor strung along your shelves can make the world of a difference to your home library’s atmosphere.
Rather than settle for sterile bookshelves mimicking a traditional library, cutesy it up with some simple homemade bunting.
Personalise it with the themes of your books.
If you have a collection of travel diaries, journals, itineraries from your globetrotting adventures, use the travel theme and make bunting from fabric with flags from around the globe.
7. Not forgetting the Kids Reading Zone: Make Quirky Bookends
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For those with kids, be their superhero by giving them an action figure to hold their books on the shelf. You’ll need to do the hard work because it involves hacksawing.
(Preferably, not their favorite action hero).
Any action figure does, and there’s an illustrated tutorial walking through how to pull this off.
8. Build a DIY Book Nook Kit
Credit: Bookshelf Memories
Book nooks are decorative bookshelf inserts designed to slot between the books on a bookshelf. Within them is an entire world. When you peek inside, it’s like there’s a secret world tucked away behind the wall.
Quite the crafty illusion.
If you like miniatures, painting, woodwork and wiring, anything you can imagine can be created in a book nook.
For those without the time, incline, or just prefer puzzling to creative endeavours, use a kit that’s ready to assemble, and contains quality vinyl decals, miniature furniture, figurines, and LED lights to complete the look.
9. Combine Embroidery with Press Dried Florals for Cute Wall Art
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Flowers soften the ambience of any room. Spare the expense of fresh flowers weekly and bring the indoors in with press-dried flowers.
Use them to create floral murals, wreaths, framed wall art, or glue varieties of different plants together for a unique floral display in a vase.
Combine dried flowers with embroidery and you have yourself the makings of something truly encapsulating.
10. Handmade Garlands with Pom Poms Made of Yarn
Credit: @glassybabyinspired via Instagram
Yarn isn’t just for knitting warm jumpers and cardigans. You can use it to make pom poms with the only extras needed being a serving fork and string.
Wrap the yarn around the serving fork multiple dozen times, then switch direction to feed it through the fork – under and over – then tie a knot to secure it.
So therapeutic!
Remove the yarn, pull the string tighter, knot it again, and cut through the loops. You have a pom pom.
Make several more and attach them to a long enough piece of string for wherever you want to hang them.
String them along your bookshelves, or a window, or hang them from the ceiling.
11. Make Paper Roses from Old Worn Out Books
Credit: Aimee Twigger
For fans of monochrome, this is a perfect project for upcycling books that have seen better days, or those that hit your DNF (Did Not Finish) list.
A half dozen pages, cut into six different sizes, curl the edges around a thin stick and dab with a glue gun as you go.
Then from smallest to largest, glue them all together.