|3 min. read|

Looking for an easy yet affordable Gift for your Book Club? Look no further, this D.I.Y. is inexpensive and guaranteed to wow your fellow book worms!

Over the past year and a half, I have been part of a book club with two other people that has been incredibly rewarding. With each book we read, we are able to share countless laughs, dissect the authors’ writing styles, challenging and enriching our minds.

As a thank you for all of the amazing discussions we had throughout the year, I wanted to give my book club pals a gift and decided a Christmas ornament with mini books of each book we read this year was the perfect idea!

I took to the internet for tutorials on how to make mini books and found this Free Canva Template by @lahrenf on TikTok. If you want more details about the template itself, please check out her page!

From there, I went to Target and Goodreads websites to copy and paste the book artwork into the Canva template. As you are doing this, you will notice that the spine artwork is not typically included, and you will have to create your own artwork. I matched the color of the spine to the book cover and tried my best to match the font and text color as well. You could get much more creative with the spines and design your own if you would like, but the title alone will also suffice.

Once I copied all of the artwork and aligned the spines to the covers, I headed to Staples so that I could get a crisp printing quality, which did not disappoint. I only needed 3 copies but printed 6 just in case I messed up when assembling the books. The prints cost about $7 for 6 copies. As you can see below, I put the artwork upside down on one side so that no matter which way you looked at the book, in the ornament, it would have a side that was oriented in the correct way.

Then, I swung by the dollar store for foam poster board. The last thing I needed to grab was the ornaments; Michaels was running a buy one get two sale on fillable ornaments, so I got 3 for about 60 cents each. You can also find these same ornaments at Amazon.

Once I finished assembling my books, I placed them in the ball. From there, it was looking a little boring, so I found some extra red Christmas tree bows laying around and secured those to the top of the ornament along with a hook to keep the ornament closed.

Lastly, I decided to add Cricut vinyl to the ornament to say “2024 Book Club.” The numbers are in the font “Perpetua Titling MT” while the letters are in “Last Christmas.” The second font I downloaded from dafont.com.

From there, I used gold permanent vinyl and loaded it into my Cricut Explore Air 2 for cutting. Since the letters/numbers were so thin I used the reverse weeding technique to separate the excess vinyl from the design. From there I used transfer tape to apply the design to the ornament.

Then, Viola! You have the most perfect book club gift! 

If you want to take the gift to the next level, I also made a Book Club wrapped to present to my friends before gifting them the ornament! This gift was such a big hit they immediately said they cannot wait for their ornament next year!!