Miniature leather book cover technique

At KnitWits yesterday, the girls and I worked on various projects, from real life costumes (Fred) to miniature dolls (Evangelista and me) to books (Tiddles).

I'll show some of our doll work in a later post, but here are two books made by Tiddles using a technique she came up with.

I love the patina on these!  She made them by covering blocks of balsa wood with a rather heavy leather.  She coloured the sides and tops of the wood with a gold felt pen (a really useful item for miniature making) and then antiqued the leather using ordinary artist's acrylic paint.  (Any kind of craft paint would work, actually).  Then she added some gold marks on the spines using the pen.

What I love about these is that Tiddles's technique has transformed rather plain black leather-covered books into something rich and marvellous.  These would be appropriate in a wizard's study, don't you think?