Mini Travel book Part 1

This month the theme at Country View Challenges is Travel, hosted by my teammate Jennie. Too late for the summer holidays... but in time for the next trip,  I have created a mini book with pockets to add ephemera collected on my travels.
All it takes is one 12"x12" piece of paper, a few cuts, scoring and folding to create.
I have decorated each page with stamps - you'll have to come back later in the month to see part 2 - but you could use photos of the actual trip to create a mini scrapbook instead.

You can make this type of book in different sizes, the smaller the pages the more pages in the book.

Starting from a 12x12" sheet and dividing in half horizontally and vertically, the largest page size is 6"square which makes a book with 4 pages.

Dividing the sheet in thirds you get 7 pages each 4" square, which is the size I chose, dividing in fourths you get 16 pages 3" square and in theory you can create mini books with 2" or 1" pages but that is too small for most purposes.

To make the book I used a one sided sheet of patterned paper, since the reverse side will not be on view.
To be sure I didn't cut in the wrong place, I first made up a "model" using copy paper to use as a reference.

First I scored my cardstock every 4" vertically and horizontally. Before cutting I marked the reverse side lightly in pencil with the page numbers, this also helps when coming to fold.

Then I cut the 2 horizontal lines in red on the photo.
Note: It is better to use a paper that has no obvious "direction". For instance if you have text on your paper the text will be upside down for some of the pages.

Then I folded all the blue lines as follows to get this:

Once the book is made, you could flip it upside down and it would still be a book. However, I designed it this way so I had most of the opening at the top, to use them as pockets.


At this point I decorated my pages before sticking down the pockets. Use dry adhesive for this to prevent the paper from puckering.

For covers there are many options:
  - None!
  - Glue the first and last page on a single piece of cardstock (don't forget to include a  spine)
  - or as I did only glue the last page to the cover,
the reason I did it this way is so I didn't have to sacrifice my page 1 to glue onto the cover.
 - ....

My first page has been stamped with an image and part of the sentiment from The Journey set (CMS021) by Stampers Anonymous. I added a label die-cut (Impression Obession) as a way to grab the first page easily.

Come back on the 21st to see how I decorated my mini book and don't forget to enter the Country View Challenge with your travel themed makes... you could win a £20 voucher to spend on crafting goodies!

Thanks for coming by,
I am entering the SSS Wednesday challenge.