How to Make Playing Card Notebooks: Accordion-Style

Here’s what we made at Church of Craft this month. I collect interesting playing cards, tarot cards, and loteria cards, and as it turns out, they make dandy covers for little notebooks. We made books in two styles, so I’ll do two separate how-to posts. Here we go . . . .

Style #1: Accordion Books

I use regular old 8 1/2 x 11 copier paper for the interior pages of my books, so my measurements are based on that. Feel free to use any kind of paper you like. Cut yourself 3 or 4 11″ long strips of paper to start. Their height should be 1/2″ shorter than the height of your playing cards.

Follow my tutorial over on Fall of Autumn to make the accordion. (Make your folds about 1/2″ inch shorter than the width of your card.) You can make your accordion as long as you want – just make sure that the first fold and the last fold are going the same direction, as you see here.

Depending on your playing cards, you may choose to leave them au naturel or cover them. Mine are an old Elks sale score. I love the backs, but the faces are grungy, so I glue-sticked on some scrapbook paper.

Then, glue-stick the first fold of the accordion to one playing card, and repeat this step at the other end of the accordion with the other playing card. I’ve lined my accordion up so that the folded edge is very close to the edge of the card, which will make more sense in a moment.

Now, you can leave your covers unbound like this, and have a book that opens all the way out. This might be a nice form for a child to open out and draw a long picture in, for instance.

Or, you can cut a strip of heavy paper about 1″ wide and as tall as your cards, and glue that on like this, to create a spine for your book. . .

. . . And that will make your accordion behave more like book pages! (And this is where lining the folds of the accordion up against the edge of the card pays off. It creates a natural spine for your book.)

An optional step: sometimes, if I’ve made a particularly long accordion, I’ll make the book to this stage, and then carefully lift up the accordion in the center, so I can reach the inside of the spine. And I’ll put a line of rubber cement along the inside of the spine and then press the accordion down into that. It helps the pages stay in place.

Enjoy! These little guys are great for keeping in your bag to jot notes, or as the basis for little art books.

Tagged as: paper, recycled, tutorial