Covering School Exercise Books

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DD has come home from school with some books to cover. I was all for using brown paper but do any of you have any other suggestions?

Pages from magazines can be fun for older kids. Or brown paper, but glue some photographs of dd and her friends/pets or whatever is appropriate for her age. Newspaper as a background works well too - it can be quite fun later to look at them to see what was going on at the time.

don't use old wallpaper like my mum used to do, I always felt embarrassed! We used bits of left over wrapping paper, from birthday present wrapping roll

We used to have to do this with exercise and text books at my cash-strapped school, to make the books last longer.

Magazines look fab but the print tends to come off on the books (not a big problem if it's an exercise book, admittedly). We used to use shelf-lining paper, which probbaly doesn't exist any more but used to come in groovy 70s patterns. Have you got any wallpaper offcuts?

Oops. Me italics didn't work.

Interesting that wallpaper was sneered at in some schools. In ours it was de rigueur and brown paper was regarded as too boring.

saddo mother me used new wrapping paper themed in what ever they liked at the time and then a photo (a fun one ) of them on the back cover and then covered in sticky back plastic . (W H smiths ) Shame hes too old now (yr 5 ) but they were certainly unique . LOL

I buy slip on plastic covers here in France - don't they have them in England? Cheap, easy and very effective.

I buy clear sticky backed plastic from John Lewis as

a) you can tell what the book is at a glance (eg, red for Geog, yellow for physics etc

b) it lasts as long as the book, whereas wrapping paper gets ripped quite easily

No, we struggle with that awful clear plastic stuff that sticks everywhere, picks up all the cat hair and then wrinkles nicely all over the front cover whilst looking pristine on the back.

Oh those were the days. We used to use leftover wallpaper - I remember I once has a very fetching 'beaten copper' look going on one year.
Then I just used to buy clear fablon (sticky backed plastic) and have that instead

sticky back plastic

Sticky backed plastic
Pretty wrapping paper
brown paper or lining paper decorated with drawings or prints or collage from mags - then sticky backed plastic
Old maps

God this thread took me right back to having flock covered school books..... My school bag looked like a wallpaper sample book for the seventies.

I always used pages from Smash Hits etc .

Ah.. wallpaper was a necessity for ours!
It was really sad to have brown paper!

Thanks everyone. I managed to get some sticky back plastic in Woolworths this morning so I guess I am going to have fun covering books and getting very sticky this evening. Will keep DD happy though.

I used to use posters from Smash Hits [showing her age emoticon]