I recently bought and have nearly completed Sam’s Study – a miniature library from the Robotime RoLife range. It’s super cute and was moderately easy to make (apart from the lighting – any kind of crafting mindfulness went out of the window at that point!).
This is the kids’ corner of the library, complete with miniature a miniature copy of Cinderella.
One of my favourite parts of making the library was creating miniature books. The set comes with printouts so you can make your own, but I thought it would be cool to make some customised books that I’ve read and kids books that my children like.
So, how do you make miniature books? All you need is:
- a printer
- paper
- scissors
- glue
- a bull dog clip
- Copy and paste a book cover template from Google images into Word and resize to approx 2.41cm by 3.81cm (for a standard novel sized book).
- Add your own design to the front and back cover and the spine, print off.
- Cut out the design and fold it along either side of the spine.
- To create the inside pages, take a long, thin strip of paper (approx 30cm by 2.3m) and fold this into sections approx. 1.6cm wide (roughly half the size of your book), to create the individual pages.
- Hold the inside pages in place with a bulldog clip and apply glue to the spine and inside cover of the book.
- Attach the cover and let the book dry!
Above is a quick overview, but if you want to find out in detail how to make your own miniature books and how to customise them into your favourite reads, keep reading!
Create Your Miniature Book Cover
Who wouldn’t want their all time favourite books in their own miniature library? This is super simple to do, I used Word but if you’re handy with Photoshop or similar programmes this might be easier to do in there.
To start with I copied an image of a book cover template from Google images, I got mine from here but ignore the measurements as we’re going to shrink it right down.
Paste the book cover template into a Word document and resize it to about 2.41cm by 3.81cm, this is about the size of the first book you’ll have made in your Rolife library and is the right dimensions for a miniature novel.
Next, go back to Google Images and search for a book cover to paste over your template. I did one of The Shining and one for The Hobbit. I’ve mixed and matched covers and spines so they’re not accurate representations, but they’re near enough for me!
Paste these into Word and resize them so they fit in the template – you’ll need to go to the wrap text function and select ‘square’ for every image, otherwise you won’t be able to paste them on top of each other.
Once you’ve done this, you can print them off.
TOP TIP: If you’re planning at some point to give freebies or even sell printable miniature book covers avoid using other people’s designs, this could get you in legal trouble with copyright!
If you want to create your own miniature book covers, simply paste the image of your choice into Word and crop and resize it to fit the book cover. I did one of my face for my teeny, tiny life story. To create the spine, draw a text box and type out the name of your book, then rotate the text box until it’s vertical in the ‘Shape Options’ menu. Then enter your text, this can be quite fiddly, but if you shrink the text size to about 4, you should fit on your title.
For the back cover, I repurposed the Hobbit’s cover. As the books are so small, it doesn’t matter if they’re not super perfect!
Below there’s a handy video with a walkthrough of how to make these books on a 12:1 scale.
How To Make Miniature Kids’ Book Covers
I’ve decided to redesign a corner of my library into a mini kids’ library. After all, I’ve not been to the library without them in over five years! Joni loves fairy tales so I repeated the same process as the above to create a miniature Cinderella book.
I used a book cover template that was more suitable for children’s book sizes – it’s a large landscape book. I shrunk this down to approx. 3cm by 6.17cm but really you can make it whatever size you want. For the cover images, I used two beautiful images by Mary Blair, the legendary Disney artist, and just drew a long rectangle in Word for the spine.
Children’s picture books are obviously much shorter than adult novels, so for the inside pages, cut a piece of paper that’s 2.95cm by about 18cm and fold this up so each page is 3.05cm wide.
To make the inside pages for the children’s book I shrunk down six Mary Blair images and aligned these in a text box in Word sized 2.9cm by 18.11cm. Each individual image (or page) measured 2.9 by 3.05cm, I then cut this out, folded it up and glued it to the spine like I did the novel.
How To Make A Miniature Hardback Book
If you feel paperback books are a bit flimsy for your miniature library or if you want a bit of variety with your books – you can try making a miniature hardback book.
All you need is:
- A cereal box
- Patterned paper to create the cover (or print off a design of your choice)
- A craft knife
- Glue
- A ruler
- A pencil
Measure out two pieces of cardboard that are 20mm by 20mm, then measure out a piece of cardboard that’s 20mm by 3mm, these will be your book covers and spine.
Measure out a piece of pattered or plain paper that’s approx. 60mm by 30mm. I went for a piece of textured grey paper.
Place your book spine in the centre of the piece of paper and place your front and back cover either side – leaving a gap of about 2mm between the spine and each cover.
Glue the cardboard to the paper and then use scissors to cut diagonally at the corners.
Glue the edges of the paper and fold these in neatly so they stick to the card – you can see in the example below that you can fold in the corners to get a really neat finish.
To make the pages, take a piece of A4 paper and making sure the paper is horizontal, measure 20mm down at a few points across the top of the paper and draw a line across the paper. Use a craft knife to cut the strip of paper out.
Next make a mark with a pencil at every 20mm across the line. Cut at the 20mm marks so you have around 15 pieces of paper. I did this twice so ended up with about 30 pieces of paper.
Fold all the pieces of paper in half so they look like miniature cards.
Next comes the threading part! If you want a quick way of doing this and don’t want to use a needle and thread, you can use a miniature elastic band to hold your book pages together. Just pop an elastic band over the pages so that the band wraps around the spine.
Alternatively you can do it longer, (but more satisfying in my opinion!) way and thread the pages.
Make two holes down the spine of each set of pages before you begin. I measured 5mm in from the edge of each side of the pages and made a mark with a pencil. I then laid the pages onto a crafting mat so I didn’t scratch the table and used a needle to make two little holes where the thread would go.
I used normal sewing thread and threaded this through each hole to attach the pages together.
Once the pages are sewn together, glue the spine of the pages and attach this to the inside of the spine of the book.
Ta-da! A miniature hardback book in a miniature library!
Further Questions
How Can I Make A Readable Miniature Book?
It’s unlikely you’ll be able to make a miniature book to 12:1 scale that’s readable, unless it has very limited text. Palm-sized books are a much better size for being able to read text and see images properly.
The British Library website has lots of information about making miniature books that fit into the palm of your hand. There’s also a handy tutorial for making your own miniature book.
You can view the video here.
If you’re looking for something a bit different, the below video has instructions on how to make a beautiful hardback mini watercolour journal. It’s small enough to be cute but still big enough for you to be able to jot down notes or sketch in.