Mini recipe book holder from a cereal box

Hello blog, Have you missed me as much as I've missed you?  It's the last day of the school holidays here, a holiday which, for us, did not go quite according to plan.Two camping weekends were replaced by a week spent visiting my Father-In-Law, who is still critically ill in ICU down in Canberra.  Not to mention the worry before and since. 

But I did manage to get a bit of craft done, so let the catch-up blogging begin!

One of the September challenges at the CKC was to be inspired by a favourite character.  So let's start with a book extract, followed by some history, shall we . . .

The Harry Potter books are among my favourites.  I couldn't tell you how many times I have re-read them! This year, Maddy and I have been reading them together. Although we've been moving at a (MUCH!!!) slower pace than I'm used to, I've been loving re-discovering the characters and the adventures through her eyes.  One of our favourite moments: in The Philosopher's Stone, when Hermione discovers that Ron and Harry are trapped by a plant called Devil's Snare. She remembers ". . .  it likes the dark and the damp." 
"So light a fire!" says Harry, and Hermione fluffs around, panicking about the absence of any wood, to which Ron responds "HAVE YOU GONE MAD? ARE YOU A WITCH OR NOT?"

Several years ago, I went on a quest to find a holder for the mini-cookbooks I owned.  The advertised offer in the back of one was no longer available, and I couldn't track one down from any other source.  Fast forward a couple of years to about a month ago, when I started organising by recipe collection (a work in progress, and a blog post coming your way once I'm finished).  I'm still frustrated by the way those little mini-books disappear amongst their larger counter-parts, and wondering yet again what to do about them.

Perhaps my sub-conscious was working on the problem for me, because I finally had my Harry Potter moment . . .

HAVE YOU GONE MAD? ARE YOU A PAPER-CRAFTER OR NOT?

So here's my mini recipe book holder. . .  I started out with a cereal box, which I cut to size:

It was simply a matter of folding the rest of the base up and gluing to make the remaining side.

Next I covered the whole lot with cardstock and some patterned paper from my Counterfeit Kit.

Some people like to get a bit excited with the embellishments at this point . . . me, I find that art tends to get in the road of life (or is it the other way around?) and prefer to keep it pretty flat.  I ended up just doing a few cuts on my Silhouette and covering the lot in Mod Podge.

Hooray! My mini cookbooks finally have a home!