Accordion Book Hinges

Good Morning/Day/Night (wherever, whenever you are).

I am a member of the TrueNorthArts Yahoo Group and there was a question of how to make a really loooong accordion book without really loooong paper: how does one connect shorter papers without bulking up the book?

Here's the idea I had: use fabric as the hinge. Now, as I am not really sure what I am talking about, I thought I'd do it myself, photograph the steps and see what happens. Let's go.

Step One:

Cut your papers into the correct height for your book's pages. I am using Canson art paper here. A little shout out to the Canson People. Nice papers, thank you.

Step Two:

Fold the papers into the correct width for your book's pages. You might be noticing that not all of the papers are folded to the same width. I just wanted to see what would happen. Stay tuned.

Step Three:

Cut one piece of fabric for each hinge between two ends of the various accordion folds for your book. NOTE: Cut them a bit taller than the paper - we'll trim them exactly later. I used solid cotton broadcloth. Now I have cut one pale green fabric that doesn't match the paper for contrast? An artistic statement? And then I used one blue cloth that almost exactly matches the fabric to see how invisible I can make this hinge.

Step Four:

I neatened the long, vertical edges, cutting off the little fringies and unwoven threads. I did not cut the top or bottom as we will do that later.

Step Five:
I placed one fabric piece on a piece of clean paper (I cut up all of my recycled papers to make notebooks for myself and didn't have any big enough for this project.) I got out my Elmer's white glue (Hello Elmer's Products, Inc.) and squirted some (too much! - read below) on to get ready for ...
Step Six:

...where I painted the glue all over the fabric. Make sure that you get the glue evenly spread aaaall over the fabric. Pick up the gluey fabric and put it on a clean piece of paper (so that you don't get the extra brushed glue where you don't want it.)

Step Seven:

Place one end of one folded paper down, rubbing it into place.

Step Eight:

Then press the other down. Now, see how the papers are wrinkling a bit? Too much glue. I tried using less glue on the next hinge...

Step Nine:

So I tried less glue ... but it wasn't enough ... so I about doubled the amount shown here, ending up at slightly less than the pale fabric above.

Step Ten:

I put the next set of folded papers on, abutting them about as precisely as I could. But I was in a hurry and cut badly - see how they don't match at the top?With the pale fabric I cut off the extra fabric at the top and bottom with a pair of scissors, but here I used a metal straight edge and an X-Acto knife.I liked how very much easier and neater that was. Can you see in this photo that I just cut off the extra tall paper. (No one ever accused me of being a Type A personality.)

Step Eleven:

I covered each page, both sides, with some plastic wrappers that I had in my studio then laid books on top of the paper/cloth hinges. I will send off this post, go undo the stack - hoping that the wet-glue-warps might have flattened out, and post you the results. (A short advertisement here - I used my own books for the stack! Nannee, The Great Library ATC Swap and Chang E, The Lady of the Moon.)