Book #020

OK, again with the accordion books.

Is it a bit of a stretch to call this a book? I'm not sure myself...maybe one benefit of making books for a year is that I will zero in on a definition of my own. For now, let it suffice that this structure is included in many books about books, and I like it. This is absolutely without a doubt my favorite design for a fancy one-off greeting card.

My original plan was to show the three big presidential memorials in Washington DC: Jefferson, Lincoln and Washington. And for text I would insert Elizabeth Alexander's poem from the inauguration. But the monuments turned out to be way too hard to cut out at this small scale (working in my lap in front of the TV anyway!) so I went for an easy little scene out of my head, with a tiny Washington Monument on the horizon - my nod to the festivities and the day on which this book was made.

I hope you can tell from the pictures how this goes together. Just fold the paper in eighths, cut three-fourths of the way lengthwise and fold up as shown. Working out the scene takes some experimentation - you might want to cut a plain rectangular window in the three front panels and then tape your house, trees or whatever back on to make a pattern. Then trace it onto a fresh sheet of paper and fold and cut.

If the folds on the flat half of the page (not the scene) look a little wonky, it's because I fiddled with them after the rest of the work was done. In this example I used a pretty heavy card stock, and the long, wrap-around cover couldn't handle the thickness of the folded up scene. So I re-creased the folds where they really needed to be. You can see how much adjustment was needed by the shortness of the final lap - the part that tucks under the tab in the second picture. It would have been smart to leave the folding of that side of the paper for last, and to have then wrapped and creased it as needed to neatly wrap around the insides.