Do you wanna make a book?!

In response to this title, I really did want to make a book, which is why I took a class called "Art of the Handmade Book". Corny, I know, but it was a GREAT class. There were four other girls in my class and the teacher was this little old lady, needless to say it was a bit old-fashioned.

We made books, as if the title didn't give that away completely. At first we started out with really easy accordion books, just a book that opens up like an accordion, obviously. She taught us how to do the basic steps with these so it made the more complex books easier to do.

We started making what is called a flag book. We took a sheet of paper, it was 16 inches one way and 3 inches the other way. For the cover pages we folded them over at the ends so they would be 4 inches each. The middle piece was folded into eight accordion pieces that were 1 inch each.

Making the cover pages was easily the best part. We cut out pieces of cardboard that were 4 x 3 inches, so they would match up with the cover paper we already had. We took liquid glue and painted the glue onto the cardboard so it could attach to the paper. While one side was drying I went and did the other. To make the cover pretty we could glue other paper to it, so I did once I measured it a little bit longer than the cardboard and cut the edges off.

Now, what's 4 divided by 3? 1.33333... lots of 3's. She told us to cut out 12 slips of paper that were 1/3rd of the height of our books, 1/3rd of 4. Once those were cut she told us to start gluing the slips of paper to the folds. On the first flap, there was only supposed to be one flap in the middle. On the opposite side of that flap, two more slips were glued on each side of the first slip. We had to repeat this for the remaining three flaps.

Constructively, the book was completed. My teacher told us to put whatever we wanted to put on the inside in there, whether it be a speech, letter, anything. I found something on tumblr that I really liked so I put it in there. It was called "one of a kind" by typicaltreatment,tumblr.com, I would paste the link in here BUT I can't find it. Oops. Anyway, here is my finished result.