Bookmaking With Kids

While grown-ups in Redwood City read Chitra Divakaruni’s Mistress of Spices, the city’s current One Book, One Community selection, Susie and I conjured loosely related bookmaking projects for kids.

The book is an adult read, but it sparked ideas aplenty for introducing kids to some things from India that could then be turned into handmade books.

Idea No. 1—using handmade papers from India in journals—was an obvious one. Kids selected papers in three lush colors, punched three holes and wove a raffia binding similar to the Crisscross Binding you’ll find here.

Idea No. 2—featuring a selection of spices in a book—was also a natural choice, given the novel’s story. But what kind of book has real spices inside? That’s easy: a box book!

Periodically we find a cache of nifty boxes at RAFT or SCRAP and we buy way too many. We’ve used CD jewel cases as “covers” for accordion books. Klutz Press nail polish boxes served us for years as necklace box books. Opaque plastic containers became box books for dice games to hone math-facts and word-search skills. Little tins housed hand-colored panoramas of the Wild West, complete with plastic action figures. And with several hundred of those tins remaining, Susie conjured a box book holding three tiny zippered bags of spices and a little book where kids could draw and describe their spices.

Susie taught these projects to a crowd at the Fair Oaks branch earlier this month and I had a great group (including a teacher trawling for hands-on project ideas) at the Schaberg branch. Our thanks to librarian Rosalind M. Kutler for organzing these programs.