Book iPhone Charger

Happy Friday! Today I have a fun craft to share!

Last week Steven and I were running some errands around town and ended up at Barnes & Noble. Before he bought me a Kindle (I love my Kindle), you could find me at B&N at least once a week. Now I do my book shopping online at Amazon. While I heart my Kindle, and the convenience of buying books in my pajamas online, there is something magnificent (that I miss) about losing myself for an hour or two in a bookstore.

As I browsed the shelves, gotta hit the bargain books section, I started thinking about how fun it would be to hollow out a book and hide something in it. Yeah, I know... What?! But my Granny would have loved that idea and suggested I stuff a wad of $20 bills in the book and bury it in the back yard somewhere. I have no idea where this thought came from. My mind goes a million miles a minute (Steven can never keep up) and this is just one idea that stuck. From there my mind travelled (rather quickly, as you could guess) to a craft I saw online recently. Basically, someone turned several old, vintage books into a cell phone stand/charger for their iPhone.

Once I told Steven about this he was just as excited as I was (okay, maybe not as much as me... or at all... but, he was going to let me use his iPhone for the project). We found a few books at B&N and decided to use a Hemingway book for the base.

The whole project took less than an hour, and it only cost the price of the books since we had all the other materials at home. Here is what I did to create the iPhone book charger:

supplies

Eyeball where you want your iCharger (<-- I should trademark that term...wait, has somebody already done that?) on the book cover. I generally like the charger closer to spine but not too close to the edge of the cover.

Steven is thinking about going pro on his hand modeling career

On the cover side of your book trace the end of the charger that will stick out of the top. Next, take an exacto knife and carefully begin to cut where the charger will sit. It's a good idea to use a ruler to help keep your lines straight. Start cutting a little smaller shape, because you can always make it bigger (Steven added a "that's what she said" when I read this to him). You want the charger to fit snuggly in the hole. (...same joke applies)

Once that is done, open the cover and trace the cord on the pages. Give your self a few millimeters on each side. Grab some scissors and start cutting out where the cord will go. Then use the exacto knife to cut out the area where the body of the charger would sit. Make sure you cut deep enough so the charger doesn't bend. Steven informed me that most wires inside their coating can actually break if they are bent too far and enough times. That is the worst!

You can glue the cover to the book's title pages and/or glue the charger to the book cover.

Just a tip - make sure your charger is facing out. After I hot glued the charger to the cover I realized I had done it backwards (oops!). There are crafters around the world that would roll their eyes and scoff at such a dumb mistake. Luckily I (Steven) was able to remove it very easily and flip it around.

Lastly, style your book charger with additional coordinating books or little cups/jewelry holders. Of course Steven wanted to butch it up a bit while still keeping it classy, so we added "The Art of War" and George Washington's "Rules of Civility & Decent Behavior" which I found too contradicting, but it wasn't going on my bedside table (and the colors looked good together).

I love how this turned out and now I am counting down the days until the iPhone 5 comes out so I can make one for me!