DIY Book Menorah

A few years ago I saw a picture of a menorah made out of books, and being the bibliophile I am, I absolutely had to have one. I searched for months and months (and think I actually reached the end of the internet) but I could not find one to purchase anywhere so I was going to have to make my own DIY book menorah. Here's how I did it:

Materials used:

• 8 same sized hard cover books plus one taller one

• spray paint

• painters tape

• high-strength adhesive

• Cricut vinyl

• candle holder cups

• hot glue gun

• Mod Podge

• paint brushes

In order to start this project, I needed to find books that were all the same size (with the exception of one taller one for the shammas candle). After looking through all the bookshelves in my house and coming up empty I was going to purchase an 8 book set of something, but not only was it outrageously expensive, I couldn't find exactly what I wanted.

But on a recent trip to Dollar Tree, underneath all of the coloring books, I found a shelf of hard cover books that were all the same size - jackpot!

Step 1: I started by removing the covers because I needed to adhere the books together and the covers seemed to add a layer of instability. I placed the books on a flat surface and pushed them all the way against the wall so they would be nice and even and used 3M High-Strength Spray Adhesive to attach them to one another.

Step 2: Once then glue was dry and the books were firmly attached to each other, I covered them with a layer of Rust-Oleum Hammered Spray Paint in silver. I didn't want to paint the actual pages of the books, so I covered them with painters tape before painting.

Step 3: My plan was to paint a menorah in gold on the spines of the books. I'm not artistic at all, so instead I opted to use my Cricut to make a decal of a menorah that I could just stick directly on to the spines of the books.

Step 4: To maintain the appearance of individual books (and didn't look like I just put a giant menorah-shaped sticker on), before applying the vinyl cutout to the books, I marked off sections aligning with the width of the spine of each book. Next I cut each section along the pre-measured lines and attached each section individually to the spine of each book.

Step 5: To turn this into an actual working menorah, I needed candle holders. I purchased a set of standard menorah-sized candle cups from Amazon.

I used a hot glue gun to simply attach and secure them to the top of each book at the spine.

Step 6: Once the candle holders were on, I added a layer of matte Mod Podge on top of the vinyl and books to seal everything together and give it some protection from any dripping candle wax.

This was so easy to do, and I love the way it came out. Festival of Light Reading anyone? Happy Hanukkah!