I’ve always wanted my own Monster Book of Monsters, however, as awesome as they are, they can get rather pricey. So upon coming across the idea to make one online (thank you Pinterest), I just couldn’t resist!

I got the original idea from here, but I modified it slightly.

Materials:

• Paper mache book
• Beige paint (only needed if your paper mache book is fully brown, like mine was)
• Brown oven bake clay
• Brown fake fur
• Brown eyes
• Monster Book of Monsters title printout (see the link above)
• Hot glue

I didn’t buy the fancier hollow book as listed in the original board, because I simply couldn’t find it at any of my local craftstores. Instead I ended up ordering the paper mache version from Amazon. Because of this I first had to paint the side, or the ‘edges of the paper’ an off white, so it’d you know…actually look like a book. I used a large brush and left visible paint lines to imitate the look of many pages. It was quick and effective.

I made one other, potentially large, alteration from the inspiration I found. I really wanted the book to have teeth. I mean, I picture this thing and I remember it trying to eat Harry, but settling for his shoe. So obviously it has to have teeth!
The teeth were shockingly simple to make. I used BRAND oven bake clay, in a shade of brown. The hardest part of this process was warming up the clay so that I could easily work with it (my husband may or may not have helped out with that bit). Then it was just a matter of making the lumps of clay into cone shapes. From the cone shape it didn’t take too much to make them look like messed up teeth. I looked at a few reference photos, and all of the teeth seemed to be going in different directions and just having fun. So I wasn’t too concerned about making them perfect.

(Forgive the crummy phone photos – I didn’t want my nice camera anywhere near glue or clay. Being a klutz I feel like this was a good call).

Once those were done I put them in my toaster oven at 250 degrees for 20 minutes. That’s it. Really! They came out perfectly. I don’t know why I had been so intimated about working with this clay before, it was so easy!

Next, naturally, I glued the teeth into place. I should have taken a photo of how this looked in between steps, but I really wanted to start laying down the fur next. For that I let a little of the fur hang over, with the intention of cutting it down a bit around the teeth.

From there it was simply a matter of gluing the rest of the fur down. Now, this may vary on how big the fake fur you buy is, but I had to use two pieces to get my book fully covered. I decided that rather than risk having a gap or line obviously visible, that I’d cut my fur at the spine of the book – on the part that’ll be facing down. I don’t know if this actually helped at all, but I’d like to think it looked cleaner.