Magical light-up book

For the Ghost of Christmas Past, we needed a magical book, where she could read the events of Scrooge's life. The idea was that it would light up and "glow".

The very first part of the idea was that the center pages of the book would be velum so that the light could shine through them. There were four pages total. Two of the pages were permanently attached as covers for the "light box." The other two were glued in just at the spine so that the ghost could turn the pages.

 I made the pages of the book out of craft store foam sheets which I cut the centers out of and then loosely attached to each other. One of the biggest problems with making a hollow book is that the pages will either lie flat when the book is open or lie flat when the book is closed, but not both. for this book it was much more important for the book to look nice open, but I still split the difference a bit and glued the pages with the book not quite fully open.

The cover of the book is lauan and the spine is made of gaff tape. I glued the outside page on each side of the book to the lauan cover. The tape wrapped from one side to the other to hold the front and back covers together and create a soft flexible binding.

You can see some of the tape through the fabric cover in this picture, if I were to do it again I would either use a thicker fabric or cover the entire book with a uniform layer of tape so it wouldn't be as visible.

The gold fabric was attached with spray adhesive, wrapped around the edges of the book and the edges attached down with a thin strip of tape. The gold detailing was done with puff paint.

The wiring on the inside was all done with supplies you can find at Radioshack. The circuits on both sides were run in series, two batteries and two light sockets. Both circuits were run through the same switch which I then set on the outside of the spine. It was hidden when the book was in the actor's hands and easy for her to switch.

Be careful that you get a wattage of bulb that your batteries can support. I spent a long time looking for a short in my circuit before discovering that the bulbs were just too high a wattage and were draining the batteries.