Accordion Folded Square Booklet by Leigh Snaith-Brunton aka The Sharpie Domino Queen

 

Materials:
decorative and solid papers
black card stock for covers
scissors/craft knife
ruler
scoring tool
fiber
beads
glue
metallic gold paint pen in fine and broad points
small paper clamp

Directions:
For my booklet I glued a sheet of collaged paper to a sheet of coloured paper. This way when the book is complete each page has interest AND you
can write notes or messages on the reverse side of each page. You can
however rubber stamp your finished pages or make mini photo albums etc. For this particular format it can also be fun to design the pages in such a way that when the booklet is opened and flattened out you can see the intended design. (See the little insert in my photo). The possibilities are endless!

You can make many different sized booklets too depending on the size of the sheet of paper you start off with. Just make sure it's a SQUARE piece of paper.

1. Fold the sheet of paper in half horizontally and unfold.

2. Fold each end into the center fold line and unfold.

3. Turn the paper a quarter turn so it is now facing vertically, and repeat the above folds. You will now have 16 small rectangles. See my template diagram.

4. Starting one square in from the left side of the page, cut from the bottom edge up to within one square of the top edge. Turn and cut along the fold to within one square of the side edge. Continue to cut in this spiral fashion until you are in the center of the page. See the red lines shown on my template. The arrows show the direction you're cutting in.

5. Beginning at the first cut along the outside edge, start to fold along each crease accordion style until you once again have a small booklet.

6. Cut two pieces of black card stock for the covers. Cut them each about 1/4 inch larger than the book pages. I used a slightly smaller piece of the same collage paper used for the pages to decorate the covers and glued them to the black cardstock. I edged both the black cardstock and the layered collage pieces with a metallic gold paint pen.

7. Glue the pages to the covers. At this point you could glue in some fiber or ribbon to the back cover for a closure, but this time I used a small paper clamp. I coloured the clamp with a metallic gold paint pen and attached fiber and beads.

For this booklet I intended the accordion pages to fold out downwards, so I put the clamp on the top edge. The front bar can close down onto the cover and the back bar can remain up so it can be hung on your computer or corkboard etc.