Making Your Own Book

Engineers are a species of recluses that are not known for their reading or writing abilities.

This is mind, obviously my going away present for my past engineering company *had* to be a book. Don't worry, I had be it chalk full of pictures to make it easy to understand!

I found that this simple book makes a super easy and personal gift for really anyone. It didn't take me long to make and it's super easy to customize!

So while I'm leaving my job at my current company, I can now call myself an author, illustrator, publisher, and now teacher-- let's get started!

Step 1: Materials

Here are the basic materials you will need to get started

• Cardstock paper
• Two sheets of a colorful or patterned paper
• Fabric for the outside
• Cardboard
• Hot glue
• Elmer's white glue
• Markers/colored pencils/scissors/whatever other craft decoration supplies you want!

KaptinScarlet made a great instructable about binding and making your own book, but she had it designed for a 124 page book. Good news, you can do it with just 24 pages (8 cardstock pages worth). That's what I will be doing here, because while I have written novel before...I was not into that level of commitment.

Step 2: Making Your Pages

Take your cardstock and fold it in half the "hamburger" way, like shown.

As mentioned in the last step, I am using 8 sheets of cardstock for this book. I would not go any smaller than this, but you can go as many as you want. If you double the pages though, you will want to make sections of ~8 pages that you staple together (follow KaptinScarlet's ible for that).

For this book, I had a stack of 8 folded papers, so you should see 8 "spines" of the fold when laid out.

Step 3: Add Your Content

Like I said, this project is perfect for heavy customization. This book was a going away present so I went to town on inking and coloring various inside jokes. I was able to add pops of color with colored pencils and washi tape as well!

Be careful when decorating and remember that if marker bleeds through or if you mess up one page, you're technically messing up 4 pages...

Yeah, that's a lot.

Make sure to leave the front of one paper clear and the back of another clear. You will need these surfaces for gluing on to later.

Step 4: Pinch Your Pages

Pinch all your pages together with your blank front on top, and your blank back on bottom. You should see all the spines of your pages.

Binder clips work great for clipping, but I used hairclips because that's what I had lying around the house.

Clip close to the spins so the spines don't have much space in between.

Step 5: Glue Your Pages Together