Diving into model-making by making a tiny free library to plant in my neighborhood.
I've been planning to dive into model-making for a while, and I've finally come up with a project to start me off!
I was inspired by my neighbor's daughters, who recently made a 'fairy house' out of an old shoebox and put it out next to the sidewalk. I enjoyed putting tiny objects in it for them to discover: a little nest made of grass, a polished rock... It was so fun to hear their excitement when they discovered their fairy gifts. I had been putting off model-making because I didn't know what I would do with them once they were complete. But the minute I imagined planting miniatures outside for people to discover, I couldn't wait to get started. A different neighbor recently put up a third(!) little free library on our block, which made my plans to make a full-sized one seem a little excessive, but a tiny free library? Our street needs one of those.
Let's start off by making some tiny books.
Materials: printer, paper, card, xacto, ruler, pencil, needle, thread, glue stick, scissors
There are better tutorials out there about making miniature books, but I'll include captioned photos and links to show my process.
I started by finding some excellent, free-to-use book covers on this blog by Last Alliance Studios.
After scaling them in a google doc, I printed my tiny covers on my printer, glued them to a piece of card for thickness, and cut them out. Creasing both sides of the spine, I had tiny book covers.
Next I watched this excellent video on bookbinding by Sea Lemon, and adapted it to my tiny scale.
(I also get seriously excited at this point and ordered a bunch of proper bookbinding materials to feed my newly discovered hobby.)
I cut strips of printer paper to slightly narrower than the height of my books.
These will be the interior pages.
By folding the strips in half three times, I ended up with small 'signatures' or page chunks to go in my books.
I found that three signatures was thick enough to fill my tiny book covers.
Stacking three signatures, I marked where the sewing holes would go.
For each signature I used a needle to pre-pierce the marked holes.
I used the method from the video to sew the signatures together.
This is a view of the inside.
Next I cut a small piece from one of my strips to wrap around the outside of my bound signatures.
Glued it with a glue stick
And this is how it looked.
At this point, my pages were still much too long for my book covers.
So I marked how long they should be using the cover.
And cut slightly within that line.
Until they were all the right length.
The final step was to glue the outside of the end paper and place it inside the book cover.
I am incredibly pleased with my tiny books. I will make a few more with more variation in size, genre, and thickness, but I have enough to judge the general scale of my tiny free library, so for now, I'll move on to that.
Note from the future: (The final picture is 5 more book covers I designed in Canva later on, and turned into more books.)
For Part 2, where I build the actual library box, see my second blog post here.