Running Press sent me a review copy of a new title called Cut Up This Book: Special Occasions: Step-By-Step Instruction for Festive Decorations, Invitations, and Moreby author Emily Hogarth, and yes, you literally can cut this book up and make all kinds of fun paper-art items like cards, garlands, cup cake toppers, and other adorable decorations. The copyright on this book is May 2013, but I noticed it is already available through Amazon.com. It normally retails for $19 US and $22 Canadian. It has a flexbind cover book, is 144 pages long, and is divided into three sections: Getting Started; Project; and Templates.

In the Getting Started section, it explains about the tools and materials you need to make many of the projects in the book, and it has photograph step out images for the techniques too. My only slight beef about this section (and this could be due to my age) is that some of the text is a little hard to read. It is chock full of information, which means in some cases lots of text on pages, and that text could be larger for some of us over-40 types.

There are 25 projects in the second part of the book, and a good number are clever but also easy to accomplish. For example, there is the “Cake Toppers,” which uses a little paper and tape to make a cute “Congratulations” sign to but on top of a cake, or another favorite of mine are the “Food Flags.” Again, you just cut the paper as described in the step by step instructions (which include step out photographs too), stick it on a toothpick, and you end up with little flags to stick into sandwiches that say “ham” or “chicken.” How easy is that and how practical too?

Finally, you get to actually cut up the book in the third section that has loads of templates and decorative paper. Each page of this section corresponds to projects in section two of the book. There are total of 60 templates, and while you can just cut out what you need directly from the book, the instructions also suggest that you can photocopy or trace images as well. Each template is numbered and includes the project name and page number it goes with also.

Considering all of the templates and papers you get in addition to the projects, I think this is book is a bargain.