Adorable Bookshelf Book Tracker
I read a lot of books, and I’ve been tracking them with a simple note on my devices. I decided it would be fun to have a physical tracker of some sort, and of course just thinking about it made the social media gods say “on it,” and suddenly my feeds were full of all sorts of different kinds.
I decided to go a different route, however. I’ve never seen another tracker like this one. It was super simple to make, and I made it with just a few supplies I found at Michaels and some things I had on hand.
I was originally imagining the numbers sitting side by side, but then I saw this little shelf in the miniatures section and had a new vision.
Michaels carries several different sizes of wood blocks, but the 1 inch blocks work perfectly for this project.
I could have gone all sorts of different routes for the numbers, but I found glittery alphabet/number stickers and determined that they would fit perfectly. I used silver, but they come in all sorts of different colors.
As an alternative to the stickers, I considered writing the numbers with a paint pen or using my Silhouette Cameo to cut them out. Lots of different options.
I was happy with the white shelf, so I left it alone. I was originally envisioning a blue and white theme because that’s the color scheme we have going on in our home library, but as you can see, I changed things up a bit. I did paint the blocks blue, and it took me a few coats of acrylic paint to get them covered. I probably could have made my life easier by priming them, so you might consider doing that.
My husband helped me figure out how to number the blocks. I forget how high he said you can count with this arrangement, but it’s definitely way more than I’d be able to read in a year.
A 0 1 2 4 6 9
B 0 2 3 4 6 8
C 0 1 3 5 7 9
D 1 2 3 5 7 8
E 4 5 6 7 8 9
To make the books, I considered using colored paper I already had. I wanted even more color options, though, so I used Canva to make a document full of colorful stripes. Once I printed those out, I had a whole lot of color choices.
The insides of the books are cardboard of varying thicknesses. I started by accordion-folding some thin cardboard until I got to a thickness I was happy with, but eventually I switched to a thicker corrugated cardboard, and the process went a lot faster. I used a glue stick to hold everything together.
By the time I was done, the blocks fit pretty snugly—maybe even more so than I intended—but it’s been working well.
I know this tutorial was especially light on photos, so let me know if you have any questions. I’d love to know if you make your own!
If you’d like to connect with me about books, I recently started an instagram account specifically for that purpose. I’d love to see you there!
As always, happy crafting!
