Folding Book 1

This is not a day for outside photography, or in fact for being outside at all. I did walk Rueben but the greyhound had more sense than to venture into the lashing rain! So an inside photography project was called for. I had several projects to blog on my desk and this is one of them. It'a a folding book or container. Not sure what to call it exactly. You may remember I bought something like this (called a Zhen Xian Bao) with wonderful Miao embroidery on the outside while at the World Textile Day back in June this year. I became fascinated by how it was made and ordered 4 home published booklets called Folded Secrets from Ruth Smith who has investigated these book/containers in depth. If you are interested you can order them from her using this e-mail: eruthsmith@btinternet.com. She accepts UK cheques as well as Paypal. I experimented with her instructions and when I felt I had the folding under control I made this as my first project. It is the Folded Secrets Book with 15 compartments from her Book 1.

It seemed a bit boring to use white paper so I spray painted the papers first after I had cut them to the various sizes. This is what the book looks like when first opened. As you can see I also used a small heart stamp for decoration.

 The hearts conceal twisted folded pockets and you can see one opened up on the picture above.

Underneath the twist fold pockets are collapsible folded boxes as you can see partly on the above picture. It's quite hard to photograph and give you an idea of how it works but this is about the best I came up with. At the bottom is a very large collapsible box.

I added gelli plate printed fabric to make the cover and it also encloses the ribbon I added as a closure. The folding is at first quite awkward but once I mastered the technique it was much more straightforward to make the finished book/container than I had originally thought. I will be showing you more projects from Ruth's books in future.