By Sydney Brink
Karen Arp-Sandel, Traveling Route 20
Hi all! For today’s drop in, we will be doing another fun and easy bookbinding activity—a pocket accordion book. This craft is customizable—you are in charge of how your new book will function! Will you use it as an album to hide your keepsakes, or use it to write your own story? Maybe you want to use this activity to earn badges for HEPL’s summer reading program—Imagine Your Story.
I know you love a good story—so use this pocket accordion book drop in to write, draw, or sketch your own! As you can see in the below example, a story doesn’t have to have words—it can have a dramatic twist just by using pictures.
This drop in idea comes from Making Books for Kids by Esther K. Smith, available with your library card as an ebook from Hoopla.
Materials
- Large pieces of paper (construction paper or otherwise)
- Ruler
- Bone folder (butter knife or popsicle stick will also work)
- Whatever else you desire to decorate your book!
Instructions
1. Score your paper one-third of the way up on the width end of your paper, using a ruler and the pointy end of the bone folder (the blunt side of a butter knife or a popsicle stick will also work great).
2. Fold this pocket up and use the long edge of the bone folder to make the fold sharper (this is called burnishing!).
3. Open the pocket back up and accordion-fold the paper however big or small you like (accordion fold is like making a fan out of a sheet of paper, folding it and flipping sides every fold).
4. Unfold your accordion so you can flip your pocket back up, using the bone folder to crease everything well.
5. Decorate the pages of your book however you want! You can make a landscape, a city view with skyscrapers, or a collage from magazine clippings. You could draw a secret surprise for people to find when they unfold your pocket. Add covers with bigger pieces of paper. To make your accordion longer, add more paper by gluing the horizontal edge of two pieces of paper together.
