How to Make a Simple Accordion Book

making your own journal is a really terrific way to house your ideas your drawings your poems whatever you might want to put into it and one of my favorite types of handmade journals and a really easy one to make is an accordion book so you can see in this one that all the pages are connected they're all interconnected it's like one long piece of paper so i'm going to show you a really simple way to make one of these for yourself the things you'll need the materials you'll need are basically be useful to have a ruler so that you can measure the size of your book and that's something that you're going to have to decide if you want to make a bigger one or a smaller one it would be helpful to have a pair of scissors to cut your paper with you'll want to have a couple pieces of sort of heartier cardboard that you can make a cover with as well as some finished paper that you can use for the interior of the book this paper can be drawing paper it could even be xerox paper it could be handmade paper you could make it as fancy or as simple as you want also having some colorful paper that you might want to use to start decorating the exterior of the book is a nice thing to have as well and of course a handy glue stick to put it all together so i've decided with this book that i am going to make the size about three by four inches which is small but that's okay and you can see i've started to put the pages together i want to show you how you can quickly start to achieve the pages you might have a certain number that you need so you're going to make sure to as you're folding the pages and putting them together that you end up with the number that you want the number might not be important but let's say that you wanted to have a journal that would track an entire month like 31 days you want to double check that you have 31 surfaces to work on so what i've done is i've cut some long strips of paper and i've decided that i want them to be three inches high and four inches long so that's where the ruler comes in handy you want to mark off pretty much where you're going to make your folds in advance and i've made these little little pencil marks on here so that i can guide my eye to the folding process so you're going to mark off so in this case i've marked off four inches four inches and you'll just start by folding at the mark and then folding back on itself so this is the accordion going back and forth flipping it coming back again and you want to be careful when you're folding it that you really line up the edges because these types of books if you're not sort of mindful of the folding process they tend to start to kind of skew or collapse so you want the stacking of the folds to be pretty regular and then once you fold a section you can attach it to another section and when you do that that's where some gluing comes in handy so right now i have this is a open sort of end of the book i have another open end here and i want them to end up you know sort of folding on themselves fluidly so what i can do is i can just slip this end completely into that end and glue them together and join them securely so i'm going to just take my glue stick i'm going to put some glue on this interior piece here and then i'm going to take this section and i'm just going to place them together sort of put a little pressure on there and then i can just go ahead and keep adding sections until i have the desired number of pages i want and so you can see how beautifully this comes out you can also see how you can ultimately like display it in the round there's a lot of really cool things you can do with it so let's say that this is the length of book that i'm going for now i want to create sort of a sturdy cover for it and i can decorate that and make that into whatever i want so i'm going to take my cardboard and cut it just slightly larger than the book itself so you can see if i lay this book on top of the cardboard the cardboard comes out around the edge a little bit because it's the cover i want it to protect it and house it i can take cardboard and then just glue some colorful paper to it like i did here so this one has some colorful paper glued onto it i can take this one and do the same thing so basically place the cardboard down onto your colorful paper and then you know obviously the colors on the outside go ahead and give some generous glue to the edges all the way around and then you can basically just fold these pages up onto the book so i'm going to bring this over fold this over this way and really kind of snug it around best you can then i'm going to take this page fold it up and over it might get a little sticky but don't worry about it then almost like you're wrapping a present you're going to kind of make a triangular fold that looks something like that do that on all the corners and you know there's a lot of ways to do this so if you can figure out a way that you can make it work for yourself then absolutely do that i'm just giving you really basic instruction on how you could put together a cover for a book like this then you're going to fold this over and just sort of hold it for a second so it glues down so you're really you have to have two pieces of cardboard and two covers for this book and lay that in so now i have a cover for each end and then simply what you'll do is you'll take one of the ends of the book and place it down onto the cover and glue it so i'm going to cover this with glue be generous with the glue you know if you don't have a glue stick you could use elmer's glue you could do any kind of glue you want i'm going to take this and center it on one of the covers and then really press it for a moment and then you're going to take the other end and do the same thing on the other cover so i'm going to put glue on here coat it pretty generously and then i'm going to stick this onto this cover again center it the best you can give it a nice pressing and i actually like to press my accordion books with something heavy when i'm done just to kind of let them really with a weight so that really stays together and then you have this handmade accordion book which is a really awesome place to sketch record your ideas it's really travelable you can make different shapes with it you can display it in different ways but it's a really simple way to make your own journal and i always feel like that's so much more meaningful when i'm working on my recording of my everyday life

Channel: Amy Wynne

Views: 2,378

Keywords: iMovie

Id: _sMvTkoy1os

Length: 7min 49sec (469 seconds)

Published: Tue Feb 23 2021