I’ve been experimenting with and attempting to master the cutting plotter I got a few months ago. Using it, I’ve made a new miniature book called P&P — it’s Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice in a very abridged form, with 9 pop-ups. See the spread below, and all the spreads here.
To complement my other season-themed miniature books, I’ve just completed one for fall. I had sketched out a design earlier this summer, but then the leaves on the maple tree outside my studio started turning a pinkish-orange, inspiring me to completely rethink my original plans. The “secret” at the end of this one is a shadow box. Here’s one spread and you can see all 9 spreads here.
For my latest miniature book, I wanted to have a shadowbox at the end. To match the size of the “secrets” at the end of my other miniature season-themed books, it needed to be 3/16″ deep, 2-3/4″ square and I would have to be able to successfully make 20 or so of them.
I tried cutting the frame out of foam core first, but getting a good cut wasn’t really possible, the cut edges were ragged even with a new xacto blade. I tried a mat cutter, but the dimensions were too small. On top of that the edges are white and ugly, so I would have to cover them with paper. So I tried covering the foam core with a paper that matched my cover paper. But when I looked inside the window, I could see the paper, however obliquely, and I didn’t like that either.
I showed my husband what I was doing, and he suggested I try balsa wood, since it comes in 3/16″ square lengths. I bought a length at the hobby store and gave it a try. My idea was to cut pieces, glue them together with super glue to make the frame, and then cover with paper, but leave the inside edges uncovered. The wood is soft and I couldn’t get a clean cut with my xacto knife, so the super glue didn’t adhere. My husband to the rescue again — he suggested I use his band saw, which let me set up a jig to make perfect cuts of the correct length. I’ve made about 10 already (super-glued, covered in paper, with the photo and window frame attached as shown in the photo above), and they’ve all come out quite nicely. Mission accomplished!
When I started working out the design for my book Summer in Vermont, I also was playing around with a set of haiku I’d written about winter. Turns out I have a lot of them, probably owing to the how novel winter, cold and snow have been to me since moving to Santa Fe from California. The Vermont book got finished first, but I continued working on the one about winter, especially when, in the week or so it took me to assemble the book, I got tired of standing at my work bench.
I wanted to keep exploring the idea of having a surprise at the end of the book, in the form of a pop-up or shadow box. And I wanted to use the new cutting machine I’d bought. The result is another miniature book, Winter’s Song. Like the Vermont book, it’s 8 spreads — that’s one below. You can see all the spreads here. The last page folds out to reveal a final haiku and pop-up, papercut illustration.
About a month ago, I splurged and bought a cutting plotter — it cuts and scores shapes one has designed in Illustrator. I’ve wanted to make a few pop-up books, but all the hand-cutting has been a big deterrent.
I’ve spent the past several weeks learning the foibles of the machine. My first “pop-up” was a simple papercut to illustrate one of my haiku — that’s it to the left.
