Make A Mini Word-Trail Book - Using Scrap Paper And Found Words

1. Make A Mini Word-Trail Book - Using Paper Scraps And Found Words: Hi, I'm Helen and I'm a UK based artist and crafter. My favorite materials, recycled, repurposed and found materials. And I love working with mixed media, collage and assemblage of always featured in my work. And I love using materials that other people perhaps wouldn't consider. My canvases have unusual found objects buried in them. Today I'm going to be making a mini folded word trail book using scrap paper and found text. I believe that creativity is in us all and we can all make wonderful things with the resources we have. Let's get creative and make a mini folded word trial book. 2. Project Description: In this class, I'll show you how to make a mini folded word trail book. By following the example of this book that I made previously, I take you step-by-step along the process of making this mini book. So it's a little folded book that they're held together with a bead paper bead closure. And the little book takes us on a trail of words. It's a twisty tourney journey. So I've made a little trail to help follow where the next words are coming. And it takes, this little book takes you on a journey through the book, through the pages, twisting and turning. And the words are found words from newspapers and magazines. They're words that I've collected together. They can make sense, they can make nonsense. It's your mini Workbook. He can say whatever you want it to say. This is a little tactile book. But just it takes you on a journey. Make your own journey of words through your own little book. If you'd like to learn to make simple folded mini book. You loved collage and all things paper craft. And come along and join me to make a mini folded word trial book. 3. Equipment and Materials: The equipment I've used for this class includes scissors, a paper folder, a craft knife that I use with a ruler, metal ruler and a, and a craft mat, cutting mat. I have also used a scalpel, which I protect with an old rubber here and old eraser. I've used glue stick, Pritt Stick, blue pencil, sharpie pen. I've got a book binders, all. A cocktail stick, and some donning needles. Materials I've used in this project or the cover from a magazine. Painted paper, abstract painted paper that I've painted with. I tend to use acrylic paints for these. I've also used colored envelope, paper, words from newspapers, magazines, junk mail, anything like that. And embroidery thread. 4. A Quick Look At The Example Book: So I've unfolded my little word trail book, and as you can see, it starts life as one piece of paper. And it's a piece of paper that's divided into 16. So that's what we're going to do. We're going to cut a piece of paper and then we'll start folding concertina ring and making the pages. 5. Preparing The Base Paper - 1: So I'm starting off with one of my favorite materials and that's the cover from a magazine. So again, I've gone for a non shiny cover and it's slightly thicker than the actual magazine, but that's what I'm going to use. Is this a square book? It's not quite square, but to make a square book, you will need it. Need the original piece of paper to be square. So this little book is four by five. Okay? So we could make it exactly the same. If you wanted to make a square, you could start off with the square. It's very easy to work out how big your little mini book is going to be. You see that is much smaller than the original. Then the magazine cupboard, if you wanted to make it this dimension. So if this is four, so that's going to be 16 by 20. So it's gonna be 16 cm by 20 cm. Now as you know, my cutting mat is a metric ones. So each one of those grids is 1 cm. So this way we're going to do 16. So I'm just going to cut that piece to one side. And this other one is going to be 20. Okay, so we've got our piece of paper very easily. We're going to just fold this into 16. So it's easy to do because we've only got the thickness of the magazine. You use my paper folder. And for this one, I'm going to add all the extra details on after I folded the paper. Three folds there, and then three again in the other direction. So folding it in half, first of all. Then fold the outside to the middle. Okay, so that's our folded piece of paper. 6. Preparing The Base Paper - 2: I've got my piece of paper folded into 16 equal sections, and I'm now going to be cutting the page to then be able to fold it up. We're going to cut this one in a spiral. Cut. So to make it easy, I'm just going to mark it out on, on here with the sharpie pen so you can see where it is. But I'm going to be cutting along this fold here to this crease here. And then cutting along here to there, where it joins here. Now we're going to be cutting along here to that point there, where that fold is there, along here, and into here. So now we'll create a piece, a strip of paper that is one page thick all the way along. And so there is only one page thick all the way along. So that's how we're going to cut. I'm going to cut along this first line. First of all, we've already folded so we know where we're going. If you haven't marked like I have, then just mark where your corner is. Make sure you can flap that open cut until you reach the crease. That crease there. Okay, So that's your first cut. The second cut is along the next two blocks. So make sure that you are putting along the crease line. So I'm going to cut from that fold to this one here. That should then join that this 12 there. So again, make sure you can crease line is nice and freely accessible. Okay. And that should have hasn't quite caught there, but I'm just going to nip that. Then. Last couple along that crease there. Along the last crease there. Now, you can, if you wanted to, you could quite easily just tear these. I have done little fold in books like this with tare instead of cut edges. And it's a very lovely quality to have. So that's what we've got. We've got a spiral which matches the spiral of our original book. So we go along down like that. So we're now going to start folding this up. And we're going to concertina it along backwards and forwards, backwards and forwards all the way along. It will be obvious where you're folding backwards and forwards. Just try and make sure that it's staying into a nice square block. And then you can just press to hold it. So that's our little book and this is gonna be my front. I'm just going to mark that with just a little f. This is going to be the back. Okay? So I'm gonna keep it exactly the same as the other one. Opens up. Then we've got the little fold like that opens up so the creases on the bottom there. So that's how I'm going to do this. Okay. 7. Preparing The Pages: Now comes the fun part. We're going to start decorating the pages and making them a nice background for our words. The previous one, I have used neutral tones and you probably know, I'm a bit of a fan of neutral tones, but I thought I'd do something different this time. This one was using, I've used envelope paper, love envelope paper. But I've also used, as you can see, this is from a magazine and there's still some letters on there, but I'm using the, the just random strips from magazines. That works very well. This one has been collaged on top, so I've got some strips going over it. Just to give a little bit more detail. That's what I did for this one. For the one I'm going to make today, I thought I would put some color on this. So I have dug out of my stash. I've dug a lovely red envelope and the symbol LPs red on both sides. Sometimes colored envelopes are just colored on the, on the one side and not the other. So I'm going to use that. And I thought this would be a really lovely loud, a compliment to it. So this is just a piece of very cheap. It's newsprint quality paper that I bought in, out, in, out block. So it's a paper block of paper. And I have just randomly put some marks on there, some colors. And I think that is going to go quite nicely together. The nice thing about this envelope is I don't want to use, obviously I've got my address hiding underneath here. I don't want to use that address. I don't want it to be showing that addressed, but I do like the stamp on here and I do like the the postmarked. So I think I'm going to put the stamp on the front cover and make that my front cover. And maybe put some of this post-market as the back cover. So I'm going to just tear the envelope open. So it's already very poorly torn there where I've opened it. And I'm just going to sit just slice, slice it open so I can use all of that paper. So I don't mind actually using the pieces that are glued as well. So I'm now going to very carefully fold and tear. They had dress off of there. Don't mind. There's a little bit of writing coming through. I don't mind that. That's what I'm going to use there. I want you to do was to continue with this Torn Edges on here. So although I've cut the actual paper, I've cut it so there's a straight edge. The paper I've glued on top is torn. So I might have just a tricky bit tearing that bit there, but we'll see, we'll see. So that's going to be my front cover. And I'm just going to do that as one single piece of paper that most of the others are going to be double-page spreads. But this first one I'm going to put the stamp on. Let's make that the first page, the first piece of paper that we stick on. I am going to have a little bit of edge crease happening here, but that's fine. I could turn it round the other way and have the stamp sideways on or I could have it sideways on that way. But I think I still want to keep the stamp. I still want the Queen up the right way. And so I'm just going to glue it like that. Another glowing mat. And I'm going to just put a piece of another gluing that in-between, put some paint on there, and then just center the piece of paper that I'm going to stick on and then I'm going to tear. For this project, I'm going to just use glue stick. But you can use any glue that you're happy with and you're comfortable using. Make sure that's on. Okay. So I'm happy with that positioning. They're pressing firmly down. That's my first page, glued. But I don't want to obviously don't want all these trimmings. So I'm now just going to get my ruler. I'm using my ruler upside down because it can get flatter, because this is a cork covered ruler. You can get flatter against that piece of paper. Okay. So that's the front and the back of our little book. Collect snips out of the way. I'm going to make the first page a continuation of the cover. So I'm gonna do read again on here. But this time I'm going to be doing it as a double spread. So I can use the piece that's got my dress on it, but I'm obviously going to use it upside down. So I'm going to put a double-page spread on there. You could tear your paper first of all, before you, before you start to glue. I might just do that. So that's going to go on to that bit there. Okay, so now I've got my little clue map underneath again. Glue your page. Ready for your piece of paper. Because you're gluing extra paper on top of the magazine paper. This is going to be reinforcing it. I quite like I've just jiggled it along a little bit. I quite like the edges where you can see a little bit of the underneath. I don't want to see too much of it, but a little bit of the underneath is fine. I'm just going to tear along there. Again, that's going the other direction to the grain. But I've got a, I've got a I'm a rougher tether. So those are my first two pages. Done. 8. The Pages - Side 1: We've got the cover and front and back cover, and we've got the first double-page spread. So I'm going to do the next one. Will preclude. Okay, so that's my first one. The next one is going to be this one here is going to show you that it is going to be the same. I've got my red one where the brown one wasn't. I'm just going to do the next one then. This is where gluing now becomes a little bit more fun. So I'm going to do those two pieces. This time. I'm going to be using the painted paper. I'm going to paste off, which hopefully will be about right. So I'm going to put that onto there. My glue and mapped out from underneath. Press it down and tear off and see if I can tear this little bit here. Really leave much room for me to tear. Something like this. You can just sort of nipple along carefully. That works nicely because then you get that rough tear. Start again. We've got the front cover, we've got the double-page spread, and now we're going to be colored one. So the next one we're going to do is this one here. So that's going to be red. Doesn't matter which way you use it. So during the next two, so I don't want to do that one there, but if a little bit glue goes on there, That's fine. Put that onto there. Now with an envelope, you may find that you do need to glue down the flaps as well. So if, say this piece here, I'm still folded on that one. But I could put a bit of extra glue underneath there just to hold that down. To stop all your flats coming up. I'm going to tear long strip first. This might be a bit more tricky because we've got simple thicknesses of paper and therefore the grain will be going in a different direction, possibly on each piece. That's fine. So that's our next double-page spread. Your folding these backup, try and keep them as square as possible. So you're basically working on one side of the paper first of all, and then you're working on the other. I've got to read, to palette to read. So these next two will be the colored ones. And just keep working your way around like that. 9. The Pages -Side 2: As you can see, I've completed one side and on the other side, I have got the front and the back cover. Now, the envelope but I had this is all I've got remaining. I don't think I've got enough to go on this other side. So I'm going to use some of this orange paper because there's some orange in here. And I think if I'm if I'm careful and pick out the patches that have got a bit more orange in there. I think that would look okay. So we are now going to work on this other side. So I'm going to fold this back up again. And I'll show folding. You may need to crease, redo those creases. Get my loo maps back down again. And quickly do this. So does it matter which way round we do these? I don't think it really matters. I think I'm going to do a colored one. First of all, let's get those other ones out the way. So I'm going to do a colored one first of all, because we've got a block of red there. Just put glue on like we did before. That's not going to be wide enough. So I am going to want to have some orange next to it. So I've got orange on this edge here. So let's just do, let's just go for that bit straightaway, straight on that edge there. Just slide it over a bit more here. Okay? Then we're going to do the same process on this other side, doing double-page spreads with the painted paper and then with this new orange paper. And this is my last panel just going on now. I'm just going to put that piece of paper onto that over just a slight bit. That's fine. And then trim it off. So that's the piece I need. Shrimp. I'm going to just trim down there. Okay. Move all of these out of the way. So that was the first slide that we did. And then this is the second side. So fold it up. Concertina backwards and forwards. You may find that as your, as you've glued, you're going to need to recreate. But working this way. Each one of these creases is reinforced. So we've got, we've got a join of paper on here, but we've got one whole piece of paper on this side. We've got one whole piece of paper on this side. If we flip it over, That's where we've got a join. So each one of these where the paper joins should have a whole piece of paper on the other side. So that's my little book. It's piece of paper. I do need to tear off a little bit, so I'm going to spend some time just tearing down there and getting rid of those small bits. That's going to have to be on hand done. Just need to just play around with this piece of paper. And I still up here, I'm just literally going to nip it with my nails and trim trim down because I want that rough edge. Fingers are still a bit sticky from the blue. It should is tearing quite nicely. If you do get a little bit too much coming off on the other side, then that doesn't matter too much. I'm not sure what I'm going to bother doing. That is that gonna go? I don't think I'm going to bother doing that. So that is my little book. If there's any pieces that need a little bit reinforcing, I'm seeing a piece tearing up here. I'm going to put some extra glute on that. So any, any flips and flats that just need a little bit more glue on. You can go around and do that. Then we'll start doing our trail of words. 10. Looking At Words: So it's time to put our words in our book. And as you can see on the table top here, I have collected a whole load words from there, mostly from newspapers, but I do have some from magazines as well. So you can collect your words from anywhere. It can be junk mail, it could be newspapers, it could be free magazines you pick up on the train or the bus station. It can be magazines from you buy. It can be the magazines that come in with subscriptions and and memberships. Anything, anything that's got written words in it, text, then that's a source for your words. What I do is I collect them up. I trimmed them roughly so they're mostly going to be probably about this size. But I may need to trim them a little bit smaller. And i've I've just laid them out on the table top here on a flipped my cutting mat over. So it's got a plane surface so it's easier to look at. So I find using my scalpel useful because just to help move things along a little bit, if you've got some tweezers that would help. I've just basically categorized my words. I've got the larger words on this side, going over to the smaller words here. And I've got some strips of words which collections of half sentences on this side. And some of these have come from book pages as well. So what I'm going to do now is I'm going to just collect words that I like. So I've decided already that words like this are gonna be difficult to fit in my little book. Not impossible. I can put that on a double-page spread. That's absolutely fine. So I wanted to make a little trail of words going through the book. And that's what I'm going to do here. So I'm gonna be using mainly the smaller ones. There may be some slightly bigger ones as well. I'm going to get going and put my favorite words together. Just put them on a, on a blank piece of paper like this. I'm not going to glue them on. I'm just going to lay them out and then I can rearrange them to say what I think would be fun to say or what I would like to say. 11. Trailing The Words: I've got my words on my piece of paper here. And the next thing we need to do is we need to glue them on. Now, my, I counted the words on this book here to give a bit of an idea as to how many I'd gotten. This book contains 48 words. So I've got a round about that number there, about 46. Some of them are going to be chopping off. There's a couple that need trimming down. They've got two words together. So I'm going to put that off to one side for a second and go up there. So we need to decide how are we going to do this now or do I just want to basket and put the words on as I go through that, if you wanted to, you could work out. So I've, I've made a little template here, a little MCIT to then show you which way round these, these pages are going to go. And so you could draw a little spiral around your page and then put your words on an open piece of paper. I don't think I'm going to draw my spiral first of all, because I am not sure about the length of my words. So what I'm gonna do is I'm going to put my words on the same sort of format. I'll open it out. It's been folded, it is tricky to keep it open. That is the same format as the Mac hit that I've just drawn. My page number one is the one over here, page number 1.2. 1.2. So I could just lay the words out like that. And I think I will, I'm going to be brave and start glowing. I'm going to keep that handy so I can see which direction I'm going to be going. So my first ones I want to put on her on my front page. And I am working along like this. I think I've got about four lines of words and I've got the words. When we look, just going to trim that down a little bit. There's some people who like using smaller scissors when they're dealing with small pieces of paper. But I actually managed very well with longer, longer blades, scissors. I do have some smaller ones. I find I find them a little bit more awkward to work with, but they work in certain situations for cutting. Cutting words like this. Aim knows either chunking great ikea scissors, they work very well for me. Keep my glue stick here and this is where you starting to get, you're gonna get a bit gluey because I find it easier just to run the word on the glue stick rather than put the, put the words down on the paper. So I'm just running some glue on there so your fingers will get sticky. You can use gloves if you want, but perhaps have some baby wipes or something nearby. Oh, just be prepared to wash your hands a lot. So I'm gonna put that straight on the top there. It's a little bit of skew, but I don't mind that my stamp, my coin is not in the middle and neither is that. So I might just nudge it over just a little bit more though. So that's my, my first words. Then I want to probably put we become wealthier. Literally it is just putting the words on and then I'm going to dodge a trail afterwards. So as long as you're reading them up the right way, I want them to be a little bit. Hegel typical day so I can trial. You might find it easier just to help with this process to have your have a pair of tweezers or a craft knife or a scalpel nearby. Just to help put that down. If you're working with children, obviously you don't want to be doing that. In that case, another useful thing is a cocktail stick. So have a cocktail stick just to help to put those down so you sort of roll it down. Let's carry on with the cocktail stick can be safe. So 3.4, that's number 1.2, 3.4 are gonna be rotated the other way. So I need to make sure that my words are this way up. So this one needs trimming down a bit. In other words, I'm going to use these little scissors. But because the blade is not so long, I find you have to do snip, snip, snip. Whereas if you're using a longer blades is that you can do it in one go. So in other words, six is let me keys on its own. Have a whole page with this little tiny word and it can be right in the middle. Fingers are getting a bit sticky. I'm putting 0s on is going to be tricky. And you continue on like this until you finished the first side. I've finished my first side. And now this is the last bit that I glued. Then need to flip it over and continue on round. It's in the same way that you did before. You're going to rotate it round. This page is going to be standalone one. And remember the colors are indicating your double-page spreads, so that will go that way. And then we rotate. 12. Make A Paper Bead: I'm ready to make my fastenings for the book. I've chosen some darker red embroidery thread. So that's what I'm going to make my tie with. So I'm going to make a paper bead out of this paper here. Let's have a look, see what that's going to do. Some glue on near the beginning. I'm rolling on a cocktail stick. You could use a skewer if you wanted to. Whatever you're rolling on will define how big the hole is in your feed. That's not catching at the moment. Okay, we're off. So just carefully roll your obeyed your paper. Glue further along and just keep rolling. And hopefully if you've got a tapered piece of paper, this will make a more rounded bead. Trial and error. Whatever you do, it will be a unique bead. Nobody's ever going to make, make one just like that because each strip of paper, whatever the paper will be slightly different. Your beads will be slightly different. So this is just a strip of paper from the magazine. It is the height of the magazine. And there we go. That's my bead. And I'm quite happy with that. It's a bit Rowley. It's a Raleigh Raleigh bead. I'm going to leave that to dry. 13. Make The Closure: So I'm ready to stitch my binding. It's not actually going to bind anything, but it is going to create the closure. So in my earlier one, I've got it Three, how hope bound onto the center. So that's centerfold there. So that's what I'm going to do. You're going to find the centerfold. And it's this one here. One there. And I'm going to do a very simple three whole pamphlet stitch to bind it together. So I've got my thread. To calculate how much thread you need to find using the three whole pamphlet stitch, you need three times the height of the book. So that's actually not very much, it's 123. But I'm going to take a whole lot more because I want to make the closure. And at the moment I don't really know how long I need, but I'm going to I think that will be plenty to wrap around. So I'm gonna be very generous. You could, if you wanted to, you could leave it still attached to you. Scan of thread. So you only use what you need to use. But I'm just, I'm just going to take mine cut mine off. I'm just going to put this onto a regular downing needle. Now with embroidery thread, you do have to make sure you've got all of the all of the little strands in uncontained. And I do I have got I've got a I've got a book binders all here, but you don't have to make your holes with an all you can use your dining needle. And I'm just going to make three holes along here so it doesn't really matter where they are. But three holes, so one evenly, pretty much in the middle and then a whole either side. I've got my cutting mat underneath so I'm not damaging my table. Okay. My protecting cover on there. Now, we know that the inside is orange and the outside is that join there. So that's fine. We want our ties to be on the outside. So we're going to start from the outside. So go in the center hole. How one of the other holes doesn't matter which one. Back in through the hole. And then you're going to very carefully come through the center hole. But this is where you need to hold your binding out the way so you're not catching the thread, splitting the thread as you, as you pull it through. So this is the outside of the book. I don't need my needle anymore. I'm going to pop that back in its container. So that's that. And as you can see, I've got two different lengths of thread here. So I'm going to just try and pull them through evenly. And it will make things a little bit easier if they're pretty much the same length. Okay? So this is where we're at. And as you can see, I've got threads coming through and then I've got one big stitch. Now, we don't want the threads coming through on the same side. We want one thread coming through on one side and one thread coming through on the other side. And that is so we can tie that center thread in place. So I've now, so as you can see, I've now put 11 strand, one side and one strand the Alba. I'm, we're going underneath the bridge of that big stitch. And then I'm just going to tie it. Just gonna do a reef not leftover, right and right over, left and underneath. Sometimes. I'll do one for luck, but I don't think I need one here. That is now our tie. We are going to have one strand going one side and one strand going the other side. We're going to thread our bead on. So what I'm gonna do to help secure the bead when it's in its locking place. I'm just going to put a series of knots along the threads. You only need a couple, two or three. That will help. Just to give the in fact, I'm only going to do to help give the bead something to grip hold of when it's in its closed state. So just a little tie just to give a little bit of texture to that closure. Now going to thread the bead through. And this is the tricky bit. Carefree. Find twisting helps. We want is both bits through, yet we're through good. So the bead is now in place. And I want to tie a big hefty not at the end. So around two or three times. If you can, two or three notes, you're tying these two threads together. Now, I should have done this before I snipped it. Maybe one more. What is that going to be enough? I think that's gonna be enough. Okay. So that is our tie, a tie binding. So it's just going to loop over there and keep shot like that. 14. A Look At My Finished Book: So here's my little finished book. I've pasted my words on. I've made my closure. I've attached my bead inside just with a regular sharpie pen. I have joined the words together to make my little trail through the book. To help her I follow the trail of words and where are we gonna go next? Through the pages? I've just dotted a little trail with my sharpie pen. If I open it up, you'll see a bit clearer what I mean. So when the words have been pasted on, I have joined them up with a trail of dots. You could do dashes, you could do a line in this one. I did just did a very fine black line and trailed my word through like that. But this one I decided I would do dots. They don't show up so clearly on this part here, but that's fine. You you maybe have to hunt for them a bit more. But that's, that's what I have done to help the reader, the viewer, the observer, the whoever is going to be looking at your little book. It's just to help that your eyes follow the trail of words through the book. Let's put them side-by-side. So there we are. Mini folded word trail books. 15. Conclusion: So how did you get on? I hope you enjoyed making your mini folded word trout book and have rediscovered the joys of cutting and sticking and making things from scrap paper. I really love it if you could share your project in the gallery for us all to enjoy. And I look forward to making another project with you again soon.