Making an easy kind of sketchbook

Accordian, concertina, or zig-zag are names given to one type of sketchbook that's easy to make. I've tried the method of cutting long strips of paper and accordion-folding them, but to get larger pages out of the source paper, pieces have to be glued together at the edges of the folds.

I'd done that by folding a tab under and gluing it to the next strip--my own idea of how it could be done, but difficult and not really satisfactory. Vivien has posted a link to Lindsay's method that is so much easier!























I painted these covers (7 inches by 11 inches) on 140# paper, folded 90# paper for the pages, and used lighter sketchbook paper for the vertical binding strips.

Glueing didn't work for my first attempt--lots of mess, juggling, and leakage onto the painting area.

Then I tried double-sticky tape--placing pieces along each edge of the two pages to be joined together, then setting down a binder strip to straddle the seam, over the two tape strips. Soooo easy and fast, with no gluey mess!

Thanks to Vivien and Lindsay for great posts on this construction method. Visit their blogs and enjoy their art!