I have been working on altering some classic children's books this week. I have an idea for

Alice's Adventures in Wonderland

, by Lewis Carroll, but am letting it stew for now. In the meantime, I have been drawing, measuring, and cutting into a student copy of

Le Petit Prince

, by Antoine de Saint-Exupery. I wanted to make it look like there was a staircase leading the prince from his asteroid home down to Earth. There are things I would do differently if I did it again, but all in all I am happy with the results. Let me know what you think and come back soon to see how I transform Alice...

The book before I started to cut.

I wanted the stairs to spiral, so I drew one using the Fibonacci sequence. It works well, if you need a quick, accurate spiral.

I also wanted the stairs to be evenly spaced and radiate out from a center point. To do this I divided a circle into 1/6ths and subdivided this twice more to create the above drawing. I made all the drawings on tracing paper so I could overlay the designs for the final one below.

Here is the piece of tracing paper I used to make the cuts in the book. I first traced the outline of the boy and asteroid that I wanted to keep, then I added the spiral and the radiating lines from the drawings above.

This picture illustrates how I cut each section of the stairs starting at the back of the book and cutting larger wedges as I went.

Here are the tools of the trade that I used during the process: a thin cutting mat, two exacto knives (one for straight lines and one for curves), a 1/4" spacer for the page edges, and a pencil to trace the lines from the tracing paper onto the book pages.

Voila!!