Process – Page 4 – Green Chair Press Blog

How To: More Map Fold Variations

I’ve used this variation in my last two prompt challenge words. I got the idea from Jeannine, who said she “start(s) with 2 straight folds (horizontal and vertical) and only one diagonal.” Here’s how to fold it — in the fourth step below, reverse the crease on the diagonal fold to get a square that is half the size of the original sheet.

Another map or origami fold variation

I took 4 folded sheets and glued them to a backing sheet to get this:
4 folded sheets glued to backing sheet

Putting folded pages together Gluing the folded sheets back-to-back, and rotating each sheet 180 degrees as you glue, like the picture on the right, gives you an accordion book that has a wonderful slinky-like action to it. Below is a model I made that I hung up in my studio. Folded sheets glued together
My friend Cathy calls these “Lotus Books,” and she has an example here and more complete instructions in this PDF.
Susan Kapuscinski Gaylord calls them “diamond fold books” and she has more examples on her website.
All my posts on Turkish Map Folds, the variations and examples can be found here.

How To: More on the Turkish Map Fold

After making my first prompt challenge book using the turkish map fold, I kept thinking about the fold and how I might use it in other books. I tried making a book with multiple folded pages, glued together, but the result was unsatisfying. The folds from the last couple of steps seemed to be in the way, making the pages difficult to open. So I tried stopping at the 5th step, where the page or sheet looks like the figure on the left.
I glued a few of these pages together but didn’t much like the results of that either. After more fiddling around, I tried gluing 2 folds together, turning the result 90 degrees, and gluing them to one half of a piece of card stock (with the point at the outer edge). The card stock is the same size as the original sheet of paper. When I glued another pair of folds to the other side of the card stock, I had a structure that opened quite wonderfully! And a place in the center for some text. (The 2 rectangles at either end make a cover that opens from the center.)

Opening the book reminded me of a flower blooming. Here’s a model I made, with one of my favorite Emily Dickinson poems, Bee! I am expecting you!

Shall We Dance? Making & Designing a Flipbook.

In 2005 I started a new flipbook about a girl who is both a ballerina and a hip-hop dancer. My idea was that she would start off as a ballerina doing an adagio, and when she does a pirouette she turns into a hip-hop dancer who shows off her moves before turning back into a ballerina again. I drew rough pictures and made them into a movie but didn’t like the result. A flip book has to work both forward and backward, and I couldn’t make the story work in both directions. (My experience is that about 50% of the people who look at my flipbooks start from the back and the other half start from the front.)
A month or so ago I happened upon the folder with all the drawings, and I took another look at what I’d done. Since 2005, I’ve made an enormous number of the flipbooks I sell in my shop and I’ve honed the production down to an exact science. I realized just by looking at my sketches that if I applied all that experience to the story I’d started, I could make it work. Of course there are a lot of steps, at least for me, before I’m ready for producing the books. First I had to flesh out my story and draw more frames. These need to be scanned and cleaned up in Photoshop. I draw the pictures in black and white and color them after scanning, using Photoshop again. I get a more even color across the frames if I do the coloring digitally. The second picture above is an example of my first sketch and the final cleaned up and colored version. The hands and head were too big on most of my sketches.
I put all the frames in order in layers in Photoshop, all the same size, so I can turn layers off and on to see how things are lining up. I also print out the frames on one sheet of paper, like a condensed film strip, again so I can make sure everything is sized correctly, that the details in the illustrations show up, and the colors are okay. Here’s an example of that:
Mini film strip for my flipbook
A flipbook is sort of a movie, but depending on how fast the reader thumbs through the book, it can be slow or fast or smooth or jerky. But to get an idea of how the book would flip in an ideal world, I also make a movie using IMovie. Here’s the book playing forward:
[youtube KL2M3XKaQaE]

Finally, I’m ready to assemble everything for printing and binding. For that I use InDesign. To make cutting the books easy, I put a grid on the page, then put the same frame in each slot on the page, then repeat for all the frames in the book. Now when I print the pages, the book is collated, and all I need to do is chop it, staple it, and glue on the binding strip at the top. There’s no chopping necessary after the binding, to even up the edges. The page below shows the grid — the blue lines are the cut lines after everything is printed. The paper is letter-size (8-1/2″x11″), grain long (the staple/binding goes on the long edge so the pages flip well). I use fairly heavy text-weight paper (32 lb) — cover stock is too thick to flip well, and thinner paper tends to stick together.

Cut lines

That’s about it. All my flipbooks are are available here. I have other posts on my blog about flipbooks here.

Magnetic Base to Plastic Plates

Removing the magnet top from my magnetic base

Removing the adhesive under the magnet

The converted base in my platen press chasse with a plastic photopolymer plate

When I started letterpress printing, the only way to print with photopolymer was to make steel-backed plates and then use a magnetic base to mount the plate in the press. Over time I’ve acquired 4 bases in various sizes. One nagging problem with these bases is that the magnet is weak to begin with and degrades over time so that the plates don’t stay put. I resort to tape and spray adhesive to keep the plates in register.

I’ve been making due with my weakened magnet bases, but as I started work on my 2012 calendar I knew I was going to have to get the magnets replaced or go to a plastic plate system. This system, introduced half a dozen years ago, uses adhesive to attach transparent plastic plates to an aluminum base. I knew there were lots of advantages to the plastic plates (for instance they are easy to cut using scissors and because they are transparent, you can align for registration more easily using marks on the base), but I was loath to buy new bases and replace the steel-backed plates I use to print coasters and book covers.

Then John Sullivan at Logos Graphics, who makes my steel-baked plates, told me he converted his magnetic bases to use with plastic plates by removing the magnet top and replacing it with a gridded mat he got at an art supply store. He attached the mat with the same sheet adhesive used on the plastic plates (he sells it for $3 a foot plus postage).

I used a xacto knife and metal ink spatula to take off the magnet top, and cleaned off the underlying adhesive with goof-off. Then using the sheet adhesive I got from John, I applied the gridded mat.
Some final gory technical details: One mat won’t make the base high enough and John suggested red pressboard (available from NA Graphics) but I didn’t have enough, so I adhered a second mat to the bottom of the base. It helps to have a measuring caliper to get the right height. A Boxcar aluminum base is .854″ high, my magnet converted base was .860″ before and after conversion.

Making a Mini-book, Part VII

Spread from my ballet book This is the seventh (and final) post on my experiment comparing making a print-on-demand mini book with making a similar book by hand.
For my experiment, I made 4 books, all approx. 3.75″x2.5″, using 2 print on demand companies — Lulu and Apple (via iPhoto) — and 2 completely handmade — one using double sided photographic (coated) paper, the other with a non-coated text-weight paper. Is it cheaper and easier to print and assemble an edition of these small books by farming it out to a company like Lulu?
Below is a table comparing the books and production costs.

	cost	paper	construction	lies flat	max pages
Lulu	$5.45	slick/coated	glued	no	100
iPhoto	$6.02	slick/coated	glued	no	20
photo paper	$3.63	matte	sewn	yes	unlimited
text weight	$3.63	matte	sewn	yes	unlimited
Sold on Lulu	$0.00	slick/coated	glued	no	100

NOTES:

For the on-demand books, the cost includes shipping for the minimum number of books (minimum of 3 for iPhoto, 4 for Lulu). For iPhoto, the cost for 3 books with shipping was $18.06, so each book was 18.06/3 or $6.02. For the cost of the handmade books, I included materials and my labor ($25/hour). It takes 30 minutes to print, cut, assemble and sew 4 books There’s a cost savings in labor for me if I make multiple books at a go, since many tasks take practically the same time whether making one book or 4.
Lulu’s site is set up to sell books for publishers. So if I sold on their website, rather than having the books delivered first to my studio, the cost would actually be $0. However this doesn’t work for me for 2 reasons: Etsy, where I sell the majority of my books, doesn’t allow third party fulfillment, so I’d have to buy the books up-front to ship them myself. Second, buyers can’t purchase just one mini-book on Lulu, and I doubt I’d have very many sales of the minimum.
The cost is for a 20 page book. That’s the minimum for Lulu & iPhoto (and the maximum for iPhoto mini-books as well). Each extra page is $.25 on Lulu, less for the handmade books.

There’s one last criteria for my experiment: I showed the 4 books to several people and asked their opinion of the paper, construction, and feel. Each said they liked the iPhoto book best — the slick coated paper made the colors pop and they expected that sort of paper in a picture book, rather than a paper that might be in a book of text only. Lulu’s book was everyone’s second choice, but it was obvious to all that it was inferiorly made. The fact that the books didn’t lie flat concerned only me!
What’s next? Sadly the iPhoto book is too expensive to produce and then resell — I doubt I can get more than $10 per copy and the markup really should be 50% to cover my costs to market, store, etc. the book. It’s too bad the Lulu books didn’t work out, as they are on the cusp of being affordable. I may make a few handmade ones using photo paper and list them in my Etsy store and see how they do. I’m also going to think about what sort of larger dimension book I could make using Blurb — my current work doesn’t really suit their photo book format, but it’s an interesting challenge.

Making a Mini-book, Part VI

Spread from my ballet book This is the sixth post on my experiment comparing making a print-on-demand mini book with making a similar book by hand.
After my disappointment with the books I made on Lulu, I opened the box containing my iPhoto-made books nervously. Happily they were an order of magnitude better! You have to buy 3 iPhoto books at a time ($11.97 + shipping). Each book came wrapped in a resealable cellophane sleeve. There’s no Apple or iPhoto logo on the back (although the back cover and inside cover pages are all white — doesn’t seem to be a way to put your artwork on those pages, unfortunately).
The big problem is that the book doesn’t really lie flat — the first half of the book has an approx. 1/4″ gutter, while the back half pretty much lies completely open. Since I didn’t take the gutter into account in my artwork, the immediate visual result is that the text, which should be centered on the page, isn’t quite. So if I’m going to print these again, I’d re-do my images to compensate. It also looks like the entire book should have the gutter, not just the front half. With only 3 books as a sample, I can’t tell whether this is a flaw in the production of only my books or all mini-books.