Thursday, February 21, 2008

Album Problem

I have been contemplating the construction of an album for my postcards. I've been thinking about it for years, literally. Postcards present a couple of challenges: first, both sides should be visible and second, postcard size is not uniform. Jackie's challenge this week is exactly this - an album for postcards. I didn't come up with an album for postcards yet, but I did experiment a little bit.

So first, I made a Crown Book. When I first encountered the Blizzard Book a while ago, I thought it's structure might work for postcards. The Crown Book is a variation of the Blizzard Book. So that's the white and blue book shown here. This structure certainly does allow for viewing both sides and since the cards would be just slid into place with no sewing or adhesive, they could be removed and inserted anytime. This structure still expects each page/card to be the same size, though.

I also decided to try customizing the size of the book. So far when I've made this structure, I wasn't trying to produce any specific size; there is so much folding involved in the spine structure that the final size is quite different than the papers you start out with. So I decided to try making a Blizzard Book for MOO cards. I had a couple false starts, but did finally get the spine to be the correct size.



It's a fabulous structure, now I just need to figure out how to use it to accomodate pages/cards of different sizes then maybe I'll have the solution to my postcard album problem.

(That sultry lady peeking out of my MOO Card Album is a card from DangerousMezzo - a collage artist who has some fabulous work for sale on Etsy.)

9 comments:

Anonymous said...

Any chance we could get a little tutorial or at least measurements for the MOO card size?

MyHandboundBooks said...

not a tutorial, ha! i can barely do this myself so i'm not going to try to teach it to anybody :)

but i can get the dimensions as a starting point - i'll have to dismantle the little book and measure it to get some accuracte numbers...i'll get back to you...

Steph said...

looks quite difficult to do but the result is beautiful !
Wanted to tell you I've tried the chopstick notebook , thanks for sharing the tutorial !

Anonymous said...

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Carol said...

Really nice way to make an album. They look beautiful. Interesting problem to work out how to deal with different sizes. I love making the blizzard book design but I find it difficult to get the exact same result twice.

Kiley said...

I was so inspired that I ran over to Green Chair Press and bought the instructions for myself! Now I just have to wait for them to get here!

MyHandboundBooks said...

oops, i still haven't measured the book yet...will do that tonight...

MyHandboundBooks said...

ok, the piece of paper that i used to create the spine for this book is 63mm X 265mm (or about 2 1/2" X 10 3/8")

Momiji said...

I have recently made the blizzard book too and love it! I like your moo card variation too....