How to Make a Small Book

The idea with this little tutorial is that you can make a simple book from a single sheet of A4 paper.

Here is how to do it:

1. Take and A4 piece of paper fold it in half to make and A5 size piece of paper and again to make an A6 size and then in half one more time.
Make sure you crease the paper well.



2. Take a needle and thread and sew the spine of your folded paper, keeping the knots on the outside spine of your book.



3. Take a A6 piece of card and fold it in half - this will be your book cover. Design, colour and decorate your book cover.

4. Glue (or use double sided tape like I did) the back of your book and stick it to the inside back cover of your card book cover.



5. Take a kitchen knife and use it to gently but firmly slit the paper where it has creased to separate the pages of your book.



6. Write or draw your own mini masterpiece.




What you do with your book is up to you (of course)!

If you'd like to make a more polished looking book with numbered pages then I've made a simple PDF that you can download - click on the link and then just right-click the page to download and save the PDF to your computer.
You will need to print the PDF double sided and at full size (100%) for it to work - I found that doing this via Adobe Reader is the best way to do this.

If you use the pdf template you can see where your pages will end up so you could write a secret book before you start the folding, then you could bind it and give it to someone to separate the pages as they go. Apparently years ago publishers would often mis-gillotine books meaning that you quite often had to slit the pages with a knife as you read.


Back in college I did quite a bit of book binding and I do love making books -
Here are a few books I've made and blogged about in the past:
Coco's book about her
My book about 'being 26' (yep, very interesting topic there)
Wild West camp book
Book of our year 2011 (still fully intend to make a 2012 version etc etc).

** Thanks to my sister for being my beautiful hand model!!