Wednesday Post #12: A New Book Structure, the Cube Book

Today's post is all about a lesson: never throw anything away. I made the parts of today's artist's book several years ago after taking a workshop from Laura Wait. In the workshop we painted large sheets of textwove paper with paste paints then folded, cut and bound books using the Drum Leaf binding, invented by Tim Ely. I loved the class and the surprise nature of how images, cut and rearranged, could look different once the final book was assembled. We learned how to write text in several interesting ways and to use this as imagery not words. I took the class to learn the Drum Leaf binding, but really enjoyed the embellishment aspects more.

Fast forward to my painted 24 by 18 sheet of textwove that I decided to cut and fold into a form I learned way back in 2005 from Karen Thomas. I have adapted her technique to folding one long strip of paper into a 4 page accordion book. I made the paneled long strip you see below in triplicate and then put it away in my bottom drawer and there it languished until a few weeks ago. I was looking through my origami models to see what I wanted to take to the origami group meeting and I found the painted, folded strips of paper and decided to rework the pieces. I kept one long strip and cut the others into squares, refolded them and inserted them into the available openings. I created a triangular tab to hold it all closed and realized that I could make the book cube shaped by flexing some of the folds. Voila! a new book was created from the cast-offs of an almost forgotten project. So, always keep interesting pieces of paper and paw through them once in a while and see if you can't come up with something new and different to do with them.

I hope you enjoy the results of my paper play.

Here is the book closed and in cube form.

This is what the book looks like open.

Looking straight down into the closed book.

Here is the book showing its parts. The four twist folded inserts at the top and the long paneled strip below. Notice the way the folds look when you make this book from a long strip of paper.

The back of the book showing the paste colors.

Folding directions for one panel of the accordion book.

Crease pattern for the twist insert "pages."