I showed off this mini book I made for my son JJ in a former entry, with a freebie. (Keep reading to find out how to get it.) JJ has Autism and reading can be very difficult. You throw dyslexia in the pot and reading becomes a very unpleasant chore. I recently found a font designed with dyslexia in mind, Open Dyslexia. Notice how easy it is to read? The letters are very clear. If you are interested in this font, click here. You can get it for free!
Back to our book. I often have a book project in mind and my first real dread is, how I'm going to put the book, physically together. You can always just get it printed. That's super easy, but often costly. You can simply punch holes along the side and use metal rings. It's also easy and looks good, but those rings are not cheap and the pages don't turn smoothly. I needed smooth turning pages or JJ wouldn't dream of picking up this book.
Here are a couple of pages I designed, digitally, using Touched By A Butterfly's JJ's Dragon Story. Celeste designed this kit especially for JJ, so that I could make this book for him. Isn't that the sweetest? He's a bit obsessed with the game, Dragon Story.
Dragons, eggs and more on every page.
I live in Europe and the standard paper size here is A4. It's a little longer and less wide than the standard paper size in the U.S. It shouldn't matter too much as longs as you keep your page smaller than the paper and you have room to the left of each of your pages.
Notice how much room I gave the book, to the left of the image. I also left a bit of white border around each layout to make a frame. This way each page will have that continuity. I used a slightly better quality paper to deal with the handling of the book, give rigidity and make the pages appear more crisp.
I took pictures through the entire process only to find out...I forgot to put the memory card in the camera. I have done this so many times. I wish my camera would shout at me, "Hey! Ding Dong! You forgot the card, again!" Hehehe...
You may want to add a bit more rigidity to your book. You can do this by reinforcing the cover, either front back or both. I just did the back.
I took a rigid piece of card stock (in JJ's favourite colour), cut it to the size I needed and used it as my template for all of the other pages.
Cut out all of your pages following your template. I used a glue stick to glue my pages back to back. Maybe you want to glue your pages first to make sure you get the direction just right before you make an error that you can't fix. I learned that one the hard way, too.
I used my score component on my paper cutter on each page so that I have this lovely crease on each page. This lends to very easily turned pages. Tip: If you do not have a scoring apparatus you can always use a ruler and run along the edge, gently pressing with something like the very blunt edge of a butter knife.
This image is of the back of the book. Punch your holes and use three medium sized brads to keep the book blinded together. Keep the width of your brad stems in mind when choosing your hole size. It's a really simple and very inexpensive method of binding your albums or projects. You could cover the back of these brads with coordinating paper or even washi tape.
JJ loves his book. The book even survived a day at school! Hehehe...
So there you have a really easy, inexpensive way to bind a book.
Check out these other binding methods:
Round up your pages and put them in a tin.
Use a typical scrap album with page covers.
Punch holes in a corner, use a ring and accessorise the ring for flair!
Paper over an existing shape book.
This is one of my favourites. A mini accordion in a match box!
Assemble an accordion album with just a couple pieces of card stock.
If your mini is mini enough, meaning very few pages, use eyelets and embellishments for glam bam.
Here's a freebie I offered with my introduction of JJ's hybrid book. Click on the link to get it.
Thanks for hanging out with The Cherry!
No comments:
Post a Comment