Today I want to break my blog silence with a quick post sharing some cute gift tags, book corners and even jewellery that I made some time ago under the umbrella of The Leonia Project.

Inspired by the fictional Leonia of Italo Calvino’s novel Invisible Cities, the aim of The Leonia Project is to take old, discarded or found objects and give them a new lease of life, instead of always turning to the new. These repurposed objects may have an ephemeral new life, but hopefully they will be beautiful enough that we will want to hang on to them and find multiple uses in our everyday lives.

It’s a while since I first muted this project and I have shared it with people in real life but neglected to share it here, so here goes with some early experiments.

These all use the pages of old, broken and unreadable books that were received by the library Le Città Invisibili where I volunteer. Every so often from a box of donated books comes half a book, a book missing a cover, or a book so water damaged that it’s not suitable for lending. These are the perfect ‘found objects’ for projects such as those below.

In addition to these gift tags, I also tried various forms of origami and folded approaches. Ageing book paper isn’t always the best for folding but I think these book corners came out pretty well.

Finally, to date just a single pair of these earring have been made… although they are perfect for lovers of Agatha Christie’s Hercule Poirot novels.

Here discs from book pages are combined with lapis lazuli and turquoise chips from broken jewellery and suspended from silver earwires. I’m thrilled to say these were very well received and have been worn in the wild. I think this may be the spur I need to put together some more of these. I have plenty of the component parts ready to go…

If you have any ideas for old book pages, please share. Unfortunately we have plenty of broken and damaged books that are just waiting to be re-purposed and find a new life. Fortunately, they are a great spur for creativity!

For know, Happy knitting, crafting and reading.
All the best,
Tess xxx