This is an idea I picked up from this post at Angry Chicken She says some more about her books in this post.
If you have a sewing machine and a paper cutter, these whip up in moments, and they are incredibly handy. I use the smallest size as pocket notebooks for me, and any size makes a great kid toy. (If you don't have a sewing machine, this size is small enough to assemble with a standard office stapler. As for the other sizes, a bookbinder's stapler is cheaper than a sewing machine...)
I usually use scrapbooking paper, the heavyweight ones. There a lot of brands but these are about the most common at crafts stores. These come in pads in three main sizes: 6.5" x 4.5", 8" x 8", and 12" by 12". You can almost always get them 40% off somewhere, although the one you fall in love with might be full price. I always get the sale ones, and I never get 8" x 8", so I have no advice about it. Look carefully as the smaller pads are sometimes adhesive card stock, which is not particularly desirable for a cover. Sometimes I use other card stock, which is generally 8.5" by 11", but if you are lucky can be found in 9" by 12". I like Marco's Paper as a cardstock source, and they also often have 8.5" by 5.5".
For the interiors, I use the best quality general purpose or laser printer paper that is within my price range for gifts I give away to small children freely. Cheap paper bleeds if you use markers or gel pens, and ink-jet paper sometimes has a coating that cracks. Luckily a ream goes a pretty long way and the small office supply shop had some cheap reams with slightly banged-up corners. Lined paper can be a problem, depending on your layout and how you feel about margin lines, but graph paper and colored paper are usable with any book format. I use 6-8 pages, depending on the weight of the paper and the dimensions and how I feel at the moment. 8 is traditional.
All of them go the same way; you fold the cover in half, you fold the interior pages in half, and you stitch down the middle of the whole thing using the longest straight stitch on your machine. Then you can tie the loose threads together or just ignore them, depending on how casual you feel. Mostly, I ignore them.
6.5" x 4.5" is the cover for pocket sizes. Cut 8.5" by 11" interior into quarters, so you have 4.25" by 5.5". The short direction in the resulting book is the long direction of the original paper, so this works great for blank paper, or graph paper (my favorite) but won't work with lined paper unless you're OK with vertical lines. (The top picture shows a bunch of this size.)
8.5" by 11" stock can be cut into 8.5" by 5.5" covers, but if you put 8.5" by 5.5" interiors in, the result is a bit sloppy. It looks better if the cover is bigger than the inside. I do it anyway, but I compromise by using 6 pages and folding the interior and trimming a smidge off the open edge. If you have access to A4 inside stock, cutting it down to about 5" in height gives you a good inside for 8.5" by 5.5" covers for only one extra cut. I found a nice lined A4 pad at Daiso, a Japanese dollar shop with lots of stores in the San Francisco bay area, or maybe you live outside the US where you are probably still subject to US scrapbooking supplies.
9" by 12" stock cut to 9" by 6" is perfect for 8.5" by 11" interiors cut to 8.5" by 5.5". Here the lines will run the same way they run on the original page, so you may be able to use lined paper, if you have any that's 8.5" by 11" and doesn't have margin lines that are going to tick you off. Cutting A4 stock to 5.5" in height also works well.
This shows 9" by 6" and 3" by 12" books, mostly, although you can see that one ended up much less than 3". You can also see that Opal is working on a long-running series of books about traps. The fancy covers can be hard to write on. Usually we deal with this by using permanent pens that will write on anything, but sometimes we stick on a fancy gold-bordered label which was meant to be a nametag.
12" by 12" I usually cut into 2 9" by 6" and one 3" by 12". Depending on which way the illustration runs, the 3" by 12" can be either for lists (if the book ends up bound at the top) or comic strips (if the binding goes to the left). If I have a strongly horizontal pattern, I sometimes cut 4 3" by 12" because comic strips are so amusing. Filling the 3" by 12" is trickier, because they really want to be about 2.75" by 11" (2.5" would theoretically be better, but it's awfully narrow. Sometimes I do it anyway). That's 3 books out of 8.5" by 11", with an annoying quarter-inch left over, or an even more annoying inch if you go for 2.5".
Another useful binding method is to stack loose pages, instead of folding in half, and stitch from the top using a zig-zag stitch. This is the easiest way I've found to use lined paper, since you can trim and use notebook paper. I haven't got an arrangement I really love yet, though. The big book in the top picture is one of these.
on 2012-02-03 at 03:16
