Iron Craft 35

This week we were assigned to do something with a book. This was such a difficult challenge for me because this is what I do all of the time. I make books. I remake books. I tear ugly books apart and make them look better. I cut books. I fold books. Oh--all of the options.

When I attend craft fairs to sell my books and art work, I always have a hard time giving out business cards. People always ask for them and I wanted to do something other than just keep them in a pile on the display table. I have one of those acrylic business card holders but it just doesn't look artistic. So I decided to make a business card holder out of an old book that I had.

I cut the spine and only used half of the book. I divided the book into four equal sections and I divided the page into four equal parts. For the first section, I would make a cut one quarter from the bottom of the page (cutting from the spine to the fore edge). I then folded the one quarter strip once from fore edge to the spine. In the first section, I folded the three quarter pages from the fore edge to the spine and then again so that it was half the size of the one quarter strip.

For the second section of the book, I made cuts at one quarter and one half which left me with three strips of paper per page. The lower quarter and the top half strips were double folded from fore edge to the spine. The second section from the bottom was folded only once.

For the third section of the book, I made cuts from the bottom half, and one quarter from the top. The bottom half and the top quarter were double folded while the remaining quarter (second quarter from the top) was folded only once.

Finally, for the last section of the book, I made a cut from the bottom three quarters of the page and leaving the top quarter. I double folded the bottom section and single folded the top quarter. All in all, this left me with a rotating section from bottom to top of one section of the page that stuck out further than the rest of the pages. These were the pages that would hold my business cards. The double folded sections would hold postcards that announced my exhibitions or postcards for sale. Overall, the project took about 8 hours to complete over two days and 12 Exacto blades.


Here is the finished tower (which I conveniently call "Hedgehog). You can see the single folded and double folded sections and how the single folded sections rotate around the tower.


Here, I have highlighted two sections that have business cards already inserted. My business cards are the grey cards extended past the pages.

Here are the business cards and postcards in the finished hedgehog. The postcards are NYC postcards that I sell but you can tell the finished look of the project.