Welcome to the Frugal Finds Weekend edition! The Blawgirl shares frugal living ideas she comes across every Saturday morning.

Be sure to check back 11:30 (ish) Monday through Friday when The Blawgirl crawls the Interwebz to find steals and deals for the frugal law student and the competitive bargain shopper.

Hey, undergrads. So the semester is winding down, and you’re (hopefully) showing those finals who’s boss. You’ve pwned Plato. You’ve told science to suck it. You’ve made communications law cry and have taken its candy.

But, before you can hit the beach or start that new internship before law school, you have to figure out what you’re going to do with the stack of textbooks that cost you a pretty penny that now are just worth 15 or so crispy chicken sandwiches at Carl’s Jr. Sure you can sell them back to your campus bookstore or to an online company like Cash4Books.net, but there are several other options available to you.

• Rather than sell your books for pennies on the dollar, you can try trading your books online through sites like Textbookrevolt.com, Paperbackswap.com, or Textswap.com. The concept is pretty simple for most of these kinds of sites: mail a book and get a book in exchange. You get a new book for the old book! Sure, you’re not taking an undergrad class in the fall. But some of the titles available could make for great non-school reading depending on your interests.
• You can try donating your books to your local public library. Even if the books don’t become part of the collection, there may be a non-profit group that supports the library that may be able to sell the books in one of its booksales.

If you have an old edition of a book that no one is willing to take, you can help the book ascend to another state of being with a couple of these crafty and creative ideas.

• You can turn a stack of old books into a cool book-stack lamp, like the one found at the DIY Network Web site.
• Teaforjoy.com recommends turning book pages into decoupage bracelets, giftags or a work of art.
• Lifehacker via VideoJug has an awesome idea to turn your “least-loved” book into an invisible bookshelf.
• If you’re a scrapbooker, you can cut out images and letters for future projects.