Seems like I should start every blog post apologizing for such long delays between posts! At the moment, I've just come to post a bit about some of the workshops I've been conducting recently.
Last week, I taught a workshop called "Tricky Books and Boxes." We made a little video to demonstrate the tricky boxes.
For the tricky books, we started with a few little structures that involve mostly folding and a little bit of cutting. There was a one-sheet folded book, a non-cyclic tetra-hexa-flexagon, a little woven accordion that opens two different ways, and a panel book. For the panel book, we used a template created by Cathryn Miller of Byopia Press, which she has posted to her blog and she kindly permitted me to share it with everyone in my workshop.
After all that, we also made a Jacob's Ladder book.
And the last book we made was this, which I'd seen on Alisa Golden's blog, for which she includes the name "Flat-Style Australian Reverse Piano Hinge" binding. It is also basically the same as a technique I learned from Emma Fraser, who lives in Scotland, and we named her book the "Secret Scottish Rubbish Binding" since we were using repurposed papers at the time. So this structure has some international representation.
Today I have a book that is a mashup of an accordion book and a flexagon. It can be opened and displayed like a basic accordion, but it can also be folded and rearranged into the format shown in the second photo.
Another flexagon today. Again made from a single sheet of paper, folded so that it can be flexed to reveal different faces. This one has more faces that the one I showed yesterday. As well, yesterday's flexagon structure required one little bit of glue to hold it together whereas today's flexagon is completely non-adhesive.
Today's structure is a simple flexagon. Flexagons allow a number of faces to be revealed, depending on how they are folded and unfolded. There are many ways to make a flexagon if you search online; but, if you investigate flexagons too much, it becomes a very elaborate mathematical challenge to make more complicated flexagons with more faces and using different shapes (be careful)!
There are some good books about flexagons like "The Magic of Flexagons" if you want to really get into it.
