Have a great adventure making a DIY adventure book. It will add realism to an interactive party and a lot of fun to storytelling.
Potion Master
A few years ago, my girlfriend Cristi and my oldest son Joseph decided to take on a DIY project and make a book for my youngest son, Evan. This was no average book.
My son loved to mix things together: perfume, hand soap, shampoo… whatever he could get his hands on. It was both really cool and mildly expensive.
So for his birthday, I decided to make him a chest full of potions. Cristi, Joseph and I scoured the web to find safe chemical reactions (like baking soda and vinegar) and then we found labels to put on bottles like “vampire blood” and “witches brew”.
We came up with “potions” recipes and printed them out in an old English font on aged paper. Then we did the best part: we made a book.
The Order of Pantheria
I can definitely not take credit for the book. The method of doing this came from an an amazing post by Dave Lowe about making your own ancient-looking book. It’s the best resource I’ve found to follow to do things right. Dave did such a great job in the post, I’ll leave the details to him, but will hit the highlights here.
Dave’s post took us step by step through the process of cutting out foam sheets (easy to find in a typical Target or on Amazon), a layer of decoupage and then paint. A little bit of touch up for aging, and “boom!” you’ve got a great prop for medieval reenactments, Halloween, and more.
For our book, since we needed the inside of the book as much as the outside, we had to cut the pages out, but leave enough that we could glue the base of our printed pages to them.
And that’s all there was to it. It took a few hours (drying time included), but it was a great time to spend with the people I cared about which really made the task fun.
Your DIY Adventure
If you want to create something amazing, like an ancient tome or something else, go ahead and do it! There are all kinds of resources out on the web to find what you want to do. Add a little adventure to your life and make something new.
The thing you might be making is a memory you will remember for a long time to come.
