We had been planning some things for our upcoming Women’s Weekend Away, and I was approached about the idea of making a plaque with a book burned into it, since the theme this year is “This is my Story.” I decided I would go ahead with it, but as I was thinking about it more, I thought it would be cool if the plaque itself was a book.

So I took a 2 x 6, and using my bible’s width as a reference,  I cut it out. Then I used my chisels to cut out the edge of the book. I’m sure there were easier ways of doing this, but our table saw couldn’t get the right angle.

After I cut out both sides, I put the middle crease in with my chisels. It was kind of tricky to make sure I didn’t go too  deep. Then, I sanded them down to give a curve on the top.

I had wanted to cut into the book a little to give it the effect that the binding was separate from the pages. This wasn’t really a great idea, in hindsight, because it ended up cutting into the width of the book. I eventually remedied this by gluing on a thing piece of wood underneath, but I probably would have been better off just cleaning this up, and leaving it as it.

At this point, the width was actually closer to a hymnal, I would say. That kind of works for the theme, so I wasn’t too disappointed with it.

I ended up trying to stain the edges,so that it kind of had a kind of gilding, but because of how wood works, it spread too far up, and so I ended up just staining the whole thing.

Before this project is done, I may go back and sand off the words and stain on the top. That way I get the gilding effect, again. Then I’ll probably try to use a lighter stain or just a clear coat. The words I have on were actually transferred from a regular piece of paper. All you have to do, is reverse the words you want to transfer, print them out on a laser printer, and then use high heat over the lettering. The toner is heat activated, so when reheated, it can transfer onto another surface. I think this will come in really handy for future projects. Essentially, as long as an image is black and white, I can transfer it over.

Before Women’s weekend away, I got a graphic that Lauren Nixon did for the logo for the weekend. So I sanded off the old lettering and transferred that over. It took longer than I expected, but it was stained, so I’m not sure why I was surprised.

This one came out much worse than my last transfer. I think it was probably that the heat was too high, because the paper basically laminated to the wood. Obviously, that made it really tough to take off. So my choices were either to sand it all off again, or try to fix it. I figured that I might as well try to fix it, because I could just sand it off later it I couldn’t. Some of it was pretty tough, because I was missing some large sections of the letters. But by looking at the original, I think it turned out alright.

I could have made it nicer if this wasn’t wood, but because it was, whenever I would touch the sharpie to the wood it would spread out slightly because of the grain. So if you look at it, you’ll notice tiny lines poking out from anywhere I touched up, which was essentially everything.