Saturday, August 24, 2013

Accordion Book for Mini Box

Here is the mini box with the accordion book
Originally posted 06/25/12

Remember the mini box? The mini box that was decorated. While suggesting things to use it for I mentioned a book. Well, that really intrigued me so I sat down on Tuesday and started working on it. I finished it on Wednesday morning.
     
I wanted to make a mini book that would fit into the mini box.

   

A piece of 12x12 scrapbook paper was used to create an accordion style book. The paper was similar to the one I had cut words from for the outside of the box. Just a darker background color with the same sayings on it.


I measured the inside of the box and cut two strips of paper 12 inches long by 4 inches wide. After putting fold marks into the paper every 2 ¾ inches, I pressed the folds. Each piece had a half inch tab at the end. I used one to glue it to the other long piece, so that I had a 23 inch long piece of paper. The other tab was folded under and created a nice edge.


I needed a theme for the book so I decided to use the bird from the top and the sayings from the paper. (All the memories we make and keep throughout our lives are what makes the hard times worth enduring and the good times so endearing. So many of our priceless memories are worth preserving so that they can be enjoyed in the present and future generations may reflect on their ancestral past and their hopes and dreams for the future.)  The underlined words are the ones I had cut out and used on the outside.

I liked the bird and the words, so I looked through my stash of papers, artwork and images and found some great things to work from.

I started by cutting background pieces to cover each page. I wanted things that made me think of the bird, music and flowers. Somehow a garden was a nice image and a bird in the garden made sense, somehow. (Now you know why I call this blog 1 Krazy Rtist). My mind does not always make perfect sense when it comes to pulling out supplies for a project. Eventually it all works out because I only use part of what I gather up.
Anyway, I laid out all the goodies and began laying them on each background to see what looked best where. I had not glued anything down yet.

Once I liked some of the images I began to glue them down. I used Alene’s Quick Dry Tacky Glue. I have had it for a while and it was really thick, I had to use a toothpick to get it out and spread it.

As I worked I picked up more decorative images and continued to glue things down. The accordion book began to look more and more like it made sense. Well, sort of.
I decided it needed more three dimensional parts so I dug into my doll making supplies and got out some mini buttons and some bows. They looked good on the background. I used a couple of butterflies and flowers that I had gotten in a scrapbooking set from a yard sale. They were layered and looked nice against all the flat pieces.

I found some nice stickers in one of my envelopes of scrapbooking supplies and they added more brightness.

I was really beginning to like this. I cut out more of the words from the paper and glued them onto the pages, as well. They carried the theme from the box into the book. I also used some of the same mini music pages as background on one of the book pages.

I got the mini music pages by scanning pages from an old piano music booklet into my computer. Then using Photoshop I reduced the images in both size and pixels. I wanted them to be easy to move into PowerPoint. I like to put multiple images onto a PowerPoint page so I can print out a lot, rather than just one small picture. I can also vary the size so they can be really small or nice and large to accommodate whatever page size I am working on at the time.
   
So, my finished book looked cool, but I thought it needed to be tied, just like the box. So I took one of the flower stickers and used it to hold a couple of strings (like on the box) to the back of the book. They wrap around and tie on the front of the book. They also make it easier to pull the book out of the little box (it’s a tight fit).

This is really an easy project and only took me a few hours to finish it. Accordion books and other types of mini books are great projects for children, or the developmentally disabled.

I hope you enjoyed this krazy little project.

Have you ever made a little accordion book? How did it come out? I would love to hear about your crafting projects.


Terri

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