Basic Barrel Roll - Book Fold Tutorial

In response to loads of interest, we will be posting some tutorials on the art of book folding or Bibliogami. 

One of the simplest folds is the barrel roll  Start with a paperback that has a flexible glued spine. Choose a book of 200 - 250 pages.[100-125 actual sheets of paper].  Remove the outside cover.
Lay the book down flat and count 5 pages.  Roll the pages towards the spine.

Tuck them in as close to the spine as possible, then repeat with the next 5 pages and so on.  Always work in the same direction.  

Book Art Project - Before and After

First the After - We've just finished an enormous book folding project.  
Here are some of the leftover books ...

The rhythm and accordian lines make my heart sing.

And then the Before - The prototypes for the project.

Those colourful books in the background are just too beautiful to fold.
(I may write a series of posts on unwanted books that I just could not bring myself to alter :-)

I am really hoping to have some pictures to share of the completed installations in a number of stores across the country.  

The Antithesis

This post is not about paper art at all.  It's about not having paper to create with. 
I was struck by this fact when we visited the Vooortrekker monument in Pretoria last weekend. The museum at the base of the monument houses many historic day-to-day artifacts of those migrants in the early to mid 1800s.  

This black board was one of them.  Used for schooling children because of the scarcity of paper.

Some diaries and bibles on display at the museum show that writing on paper was a beautiful and intentional art. 

All of this is thought provoking, as a technological society we hint at being paperless again, but probably use more paper than ever.


The Great Trek (Afrikaans: Die Groot Trek) was an eastward and north-eastward migration away from British control in the Cape Colony during the 1830s and 1840s by Boers (Dutch/Afrikaans for 'farmers') The migrants were descended from settlers from western mainland Europe, most notably from the Netherlands, northwest Germany and French Huguenots.

In The Beginning...

When I first entered the world of book art, I thought it would last for about 2 months.  I made a trip to my local charity store and bought 3 copies of the same book.  The saleslady kindly alerted me to the fact that they were the same book, but I told her I was not going to read them, I was going to fold them!  
Ohh... Mmm...  

I did fold the books, and place them in a bowl on my coffee table.  I thought they would make a nice conversation piece, and then I would chuck them out when they got old and dusty after a month or two.
Little did I know just how many hundreds of books would be transformed because of this.
I wrote a blog post about my first attempts in May 2008 and in September of the same year, I wrote an article on the subject for Elle Decoration
Since then, my own home has been decorated with numerous versions of book art, or bibliogami as I like to call it, and I have sold book art through my Freshly Found store, and supplied the Shaw Sisters too.
I hardly read books.  I am more of a doer.  But I have grown to know and love them intimately.  The various page thicknesses, grains of paper, bendiness of spines, yellowing of pages and my favourite - the 'bookmarks' that are left behind.