The Elevated Book Vase That Will Give You The Most Beautiful Bouquet

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For book lovers, great volumes of literature are a thing of beauty, flowers for the soul when life gets weary, and decorations for tabletops in every room of the house. Crafty book lovers know how to combine all of these elements to create a vase that bursts with the blooms of the season, all wrapped up in the leaves of literature. It's a one-of-a-kind vase that taps the most unlikely building material around — an old book you've remade to hold a cornucopia of flowers and greens.

The foundation of this project, the vase, is made of any repurposed old book of your choice. In theory, you could use any book. But aesthetically and practically speaking, a hardback book will look better and be sturdier, due to its hard cardboard backing, than a paperback will be. It would also be helpful to select a book that's on the taller side when you stand it up. This feature will allow you to stuff its pages with longer flower and greenery stems than a short, small book will.

You can use fresh flowers for this, as @peonyandhoneydid on Instagram. But you do also have the option of filling the bouquet with dried or silk flowers instead. This gives you more leeway from a timing perspective since you won't be worried about the flowers dying before you can display them. This would also come in handy if you're prepping the book vase for a big party and have lots of non-flower stuff to do first. Finally, you'll need a glue gun to secure the pages into shape.

To make the book ready to hold the flowers, you need to modify the pages. Basically, you're going to take the edges of a few of the top pages, fold them into the spine of the book, and then secure them in place with a line of glue from your glue gun. Work with the center two pages first, carefully folding them inward, with the outer edges of the pages being parallel with the spine of the book. Once those are in place, you can take the corner of the next pages and fold it crosswise before gluing it down into the spine of the book. Repeat this until five or six pages on each side of the book have been treated.

If you plan on allowing the flowers to dry after you've placed them into the book, consider working with flowers that do well as dried flowers. Some pretty options are the globe thistle, baby's breath, straw flowers, roses, or a stunning gothic hydrangea variety. Trim the stems down so that the heads of the flowers just peek out of the tops of the book's pages. Finally, it's hard to overstate the potential for originality that comes with this project. 

It's crucial to choose the book for the vase with some forethought. For example, if you're decorating with a nautical theme for a party, choose a tome that fits the theme, like "Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea" by Jules Verne. You can repeat the nautical theme with the flowers, too, by selecting blooms that grow near the sea, like sea holly or yarrow. 

The construction of this project is such that you can lay the book flat and the flowers will look like they're exploding out of the sides of the folded pages. As such, the display will look perfectly pretty if you leave things as is. However, if you want to make this unique vase look even more striking, consider doing a couple of simple things to embellish the book even more. To start with, try displaying the bouquet on a book stand. It'll elevate the top of the book and raise the back up off the table. A wooden cookbook holder from the Canareen Store adds some rustic charm to your chosen tome. 

For a more elevated look — quite literally — raise the book even higher by placing it on a book holder stand from UPERGO Store. This item has some dainty metal brackets that are designed to keep the pages open, and in this case, prevent the book from falling off the stand. Because it's raised off the table, you also have room below the stand to decorate it with more flowers and create a more complete display.

Finally, breathe new life into your old book by stamping the pages with ink. A fun idea is to get an old stamp from the local library and imprint the pages with the place's name and the book's due date. It'd also be cute to lightly stamp some decorative elements, like flowers or pictures that represent the book's theme. Going back to the nautical theme, this might mean rubber stamping anchors or mermaids on the pages before you fold them into place.