Sunday, January 8, 2012

"They" will never know it's a Bible!



In countries all around the world, Bibles are being taken away from people.  Have you ever thought that it might happen here one day?  I decided to camouflage an old Bible and I don't think anyone will ever suspect it's a Bible (well, unless they started to read the contents!

Found an old 1901 American Standard Version on ebay.  It's my preference.  A better translation than the KJV.


But it was in bad shape.






You can see that the signatures are coming apart.  Now, if you know how to build signatures, you can repair them....just rebuild them.  My problem is that this paper was printed in 1901....and the paper is really fragile.


and the thread they used in the signatures were very, very fine.  So you can see here how they are broken.


I used fine silk thread to rebuild the signatures....carefully pulling through pre-existing holes.  It worked!


I then covered the book with leather book liner.  This is very, very thin leather usually used for the inside of a book.  It is too thin to be tooled, but it can be distressed.  The leather is usually a very pale shade of pink.


I used a scrap of leather to decide what shade of alcohol ink to use to get the shade I wanted.  I settled on a mix of Caramel and Butterscotch.  Have you ever mixed alcohol inks?  I used a makeup sponge to apply the ink to the leather.  I love the distress look I got.



 Inside the front, I covered the title page with sheet music and added a coordinating library card



This is inside the back cover



This is the first page you see.  Nothing saying it's a Bible



But it gets better!  I was at a thrift store and found this bag.  It is buttery soft leather - oh so yummy!  I don't know if this was used to carry arrows or what, but it was too great to resist!  I fell in love with the twisted, beaded fringe down the side.


And of course....I cut into it!  GASP!!!


Punched holes across the bottom, rethreaded them, and turned it into a book bag for the Bible.  



If you saw this would you even suspect there's a Bible inside?  Great to take camping as well.


I used a bit of the leftover scraps from the bag to create a cool front for the Bible.  You can see the distressed leather, how the tongs tie around the Bible and loop into a Buffalo head nickel button.


Finally, I used distress ink to ink the edges - they were sort of red and now they're more brown


I have a total of $18 in the bag and Bible.  It took about 4 hours to cover the Bible and make the bag.  Not too bad for a Sunday afternoon.  Give it some thought - I think it's a really great idea to camouflage a Bible.  Just in case!

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

I continue to be amazed with your ideas and applicatiions. There is surely an unending fount of inspiration within you.