CONCERTINA BOOK TUTORIAL

Had another go at crayon batik. I wanted to try some smaller images for card designs (sorry about the dodgy photo). It ended up looking more like a night scene. I was a little worried I used too dark a paint, but I am quite pleased with this little cat!

Yesterday I had a lovely visit to my friend Jayne. We did lots of giggling and a little bit of crafting in her converted caravan studio ( I meant to take some photos to show. Have to remember next time!) It is so cool and she is just amazing as she built all the stuff in it herself. Thank you to her daughters for sorting me loads of cool buttons!

We did lino-printing. This is meant to be Christmasy. I know it's too, too, too early, but I only ever manage to get about two home-made cards out to people, so I thought I might be a little more organised (HA HA HA) this year. I'm not sure it quite worked with the print, but I think I like it!

We also made concertina books. We are making them to do an art swap of kinds, although the book comes back to the original artist. You draw, paint or collage, etc on a few pages and then pass it on to the next artist to do their bit carrying on from yours. ( Hope that makes some sense to you?) You keep doing this until the book is full and then it goes back to the person who made the book in the first place. We are making up our own themes to keep a thread throughout each book. I'm not entirely sure what I'm going to do. I thought may be stories!?! Fairy tales or favourite stories. I'd like to use different paint techniques to build the pages up. I find that although I do this kind of stuff in workshops, I never really do it for myself. So it would be inspirational and a challenge to myself to this in the book!

Anyway I thought that may be I could give a simple tutorial for making a concertina book. There are different ways of making them, but I have chosen one of the simpler techniques and have made mine from scraps of brown recycled paper. I love working on brown paper and I quite like a lived in look in my work.

Take two pieces of thick card and cut to the size that you want your concertina book to be (Mine is about 8in x 91/2in). Cover and decorate both pieces of card however you want. I used old sheet music with a lino-printed butterfly design. I placed the card on the paper and cut the four corners off. I then glued the paper to the card and folded over and glued the paper edges.

Take pieces of paper and mountain and valley fold in a concertina fashion. Each page that is created needs to be folded to fit the same size as your card covers.

If you need to add more length to your book, just make sure that before you start folding the paper, make a small fold at the end of the paper and then measure out your pages from what is left. This small fold will then be glued to another small fold on your other piece of paper. (Hope that also makes sense) The picture below shows where I have glued my two small folds together. They sit on a main fold between two pages (on a mountain fold).

I also glued two pieces of paper together where it would sit in the middle of a page. As I said I like a lived in look, so I wasn't worried by it being perfect and neat.