Magazine Folio holder

This post is a re-write of an article I wrote many years ago for the Discworld stamp journal, The Stanley Howler Stamp Journal.  The purpose of the article and this post is to create a non-damaging folio cover for magazines so they can be neat and sorted, while still just as easy to read, plus can be removed without difficulty if needed.

 

All of the sizes and measurements given here are for A5 magazines (booklets made when an A4 piece of paper is folded in half and stapled in the middle).  If you are dealing with magazines of a different size, you will need to work out your own sizes.  A good rule of thumb is to ensure that the cover is a few millimetres larger than the cover of your magazines to allow for movement and to protect the contents.

Materials

• Thick card (posterboard or similar) NOT corrugated card for the spine in particular as it will not have the necessary compressive strength.  Two larger pieces for the cover (15.1cm by 21.8 cm) and one narrow piece (21.8 cm by the width of your spine- for an 8 journal cover 2.5 cm is good, for a 10 journal cover, I am using a 3 cm width piece)

• A sharp knife (plus bandaids/ first aid kit/ blood bank depending on how clumsy you are!
• A steel ruler
• Cutting mat
• Thick card or chipboard (for best effect the card should be difficult to fold- about the thickness of a hard cover book’s cover.).
• PVA glue
• Pretty paper (It is possible to get creative here if you like- fabric can be used if first stuck onto a plain piece of paper and there is practically an unlimited number of different colours and designs of paper available)
• String or thin cord (this must be STRONG- if you can easily break it with your hands it is too weak)
• Lots of clean, scrap paper and newspaper
• Large flat weights (I use old textbooks)

Method

Take your two large pieces of card and the paper you will use for the cover (green in my case).  Apply an thin, even coat of glue to one side of your card and glue to the paper.

To prevent wrinkles, immediately place this, paper side down, onto a pile of your newspaper with a clean piece of scrap paper in between (so newsprint doesn't get onto your cover).  Then place a heavy book ontop. This draws the moisture of the glue out of the cover paper and the weight stops wrinkles having a chance to form.

Wait until dry, then turn over and glue the sides over.  One neat way to do this is to trim the corners on a 45 degree angle to the card corner, at least one centimetre away from the card.  Fold this over to the card and glue down.  Repeat on all corners.

Then fold and glue each side down.  Leave to dry.

In the meantime, you can also do the same thing with the spine piece, or if you choose to add mock headband affects (see step 7), then you could skip this or just colour/paint the ends.

I just coloured the ends in on my spine as I will be covering it later

Take the spine and use the back of a knife or the steel ruler to place even 'notches' in the ends of the card where the string will go.  This ensures the string stays in place.

Tape one end of the string to the back of the spine and wrap the string TIGHTLY around the spine to create the necessary number of loops for your journal.  

Tape the other end in place, then use craft glue or hot glue along the entire back to secure the string.  

Back of spine after wrapping thread, before adding glue

Front of spine.  Each length of thread will hold one magazine

Optional:  Inbetween the string on the ends, take some contrasting coloured embroidery floss or similar and glue lengths in between.  This gives the appearance of headbands of a book (see Part 3 of my Book binding series to find out what these are in more detail)
Over this, glue a piece of paper, cut to a little narrower and shorter than the spine.  This helps to secure the string and also provides a good surface to glue the book together with later.  Leave to dry.
Take another piece of paper to make the exterior spine.  This paper should be fairly thick and sturdy as it will be under the most long term stress.  The paper should be taller by at least 5 cm and the width of your spine plus 1.5 cm to allow the paper to fold, plus 2-3 cm on each side for the spine paper to be glued to the covered.  In practical terms for me, that meant a piece of paper 28 cm tall by 15 cm wide.

Carefully place the spine card onto the spine and ensure it is centred.  Mark this position, then glue the back of the spine card (the bit with the paper covering the strings) to this spine paper. Let dry.

Now you can glue the covers to the spine paper.  You want to leave room for the paper to fold or your holder will not be able to close.  Try to have a even gap of 0.75-1cm on each side.  One easy way is to use a bit of scrap card cut to size that you can use to align the cover in the correct place.

Here you can see the brown bit of scrap card I used to position the cover in the right place and straight.  You can also see that I have glued green thread between the gold string on the spine prior to gluing it to the spine paper to get a headband effect and to hide the card

Glue both covers into place and let dry.

Optional- if you are using thinner paper or you think it will get a lot of wear, you may wish to add a bit of extra reinforcing paper on the top and bottom parts.  If so, do so now.

Use a pair of scissors or a sharp knife with ruler to cut the spine paper at a slight angle.  You want this cut to be to the corner of each spine card so the paper can be folded over and glued (see the picture below).

Make the cuts at a slight angle.  Note the extra paper I've glued in first to reinforce the ends of the spines

Once the sides are glued in place, use a ruler and a knife to cut the little left over piece off, top and bottom.

Use a ruler and a sharp knife to cut off this extra piece of paper flush with the edge of the book holder

Final step is to cut some endpapers inside to neaten things up.  Either measure up some paper a few millimetres smaller than the journal holder or use one or two pieces of A4 paper.  If you can find a piece of paper long enough great, but otherwise cut both pieces to a length so that one is long enough for one cover to the edge of the other and the other the size of the other cover.  It's your choice if you would like the edge of the paper showing on the back or the front or back, but I do suggest you glue the longer piece of paper (the bit that will cover the spine) down first, then the smaller piece of paper.  Let everything dry.

Before use, lay it flat on a table, outside facing up and run your thumb down the fold lines for the covers.  This helps neatens everything up and ensures the folds look right.

To use, open each magazine in the middle and insert it under a string.  That's it!  If you have any extra bits and bobs, a page protector with with the folder holes trimmed off works well either on an extra string or inserted in or around another magazine.

80's throwback- Soft toy in a car window

When I was a kid I loved Garfield.  I liked lasagne, and so does Garfield.  I wasn't any more thrilled with Mondays then than I am now and while I didn't have a coffee habit when I was a kid, I love my coffee now.  For a while in the 80's having a Garfield in the back window was a popular thing- similar to those nodding dog figures that were a thing for a while or fluffy dice handing of the rear vision mirror.  I always wanted a Garfield in the car as a kid so when I got my first car (1979 Toyota Corona) my sister gave me one for my birthday.

Aside from fulfilling that childhood wish, Garfield has also been brilliant to identify my car in a carpark.  Particularly since Garfield is much rarer to see these days!

This was particularly useful as for my first and second cars, my key could open the door of any similar make and aged car (and vice versa!).  This caught me once on the way home from university when I hopped into my car and noticed that my stuff inside wasn't right.  Moments later the lightbulb dinged and I quickly slunk out of the stranger's car that was the same make, model and colour as mine, and walked up the road several meters to get into MY car to get home!

But my Garfield is getting old.  Years in the sun have bleached his orange fur, while the rubber in the suction cups and the thread holding them on both failed.  So Garfield needs a makeover.  Since the method is ridiculously simple and could be used for any soft toy if you were looking for a car identifier, I thought I'd share it.

Equipment

• A small soft toy (too big and the suction cups may not hold the toy up- not to mention issues blocking a view when driving!)
• Suction cups- I found a set of 9 with hooks built in, in a local $2 shop in the hardware related section although I sometimes see them with bathroom related stuff
• Sharpies of assorted colours (optional if your toy is faded)
• Sewing needle
• Strong cotton thread
• Glue or nail polish for knots (optional)

My Garfield fresh from the car after his previous suction cups died.

The first step is only if you have a faded toy you wish to revive for nostalgic reasons.  I wouldn't do this if it is a treasured childhood toy that is still snuggled, but if the toy is going to sit on a shelf or similarly it should be OK.  Basically, it is to give your toy a dye job using Sharpies (or non-brand name permament markers).  Sharpies these days come in all sorts of colours these days so it shouldn't be too hard to come up with the colours you need.  In my case, an orange, yellow and black.  Just run the side over the toy for the large areas or the point if colouring smaller areas.

As you can see, he looks a little blotchy but that's mainly because the camera lighting, plus that will fade a bit over time and even out.

Then sew the suction cups to each limb.  Ensure you use a good amount of thread there as UV light is going to weaken those joins over time.  If you are paranoid about your knots, add a drop of glue or nail polish to each knot.  And that's it!

Not the most exciting tutorial in the world but if you've ever wandered constantly in a carpark looking for a car in a sea of very similar coloured cars it might be worth a go!

Works in progress or just finished

No tutorial for this post, just a few things I've knocked together at the half way point of my holidays.  Since I was already in the process of working on something for my car, I tried making a rubbish bin to pop in the card using a great tutorial on Crafster.  While the original tutorial included both a inner, removable bag and an outer fabric liner, I elected to just make a single plastic bag with a tag.  It won't be terribly obvious where I keep my bin anyway.

This was a great, cheap project as the material is from my ill fated sashing for the quilt top shown here.  After making the sashing, laying it out next to the quilt my first thought was.... 'yuck, that doesn't work'.  The trick is going to be working out what to do with the rest of it now! The plastic is a recycling job using the plastic from a set of sheets I bought a while ago.  You can also buy it by the meter at Spotlight or similar but don't bother if you only need a bit like I did!  Although this bin won't be water tight, it will be easily cleanable if a few drops leak out of an empty coffee cup or the like and who puts full drinks into the bin in their car anyway?

I've also been working on a crochet bag on and off as it fits nicely in my day to day bag as a travel project.  I'm about 3/4 of the way through the crochet side of things, then I have to work out if I want to try and dye the motifs (I couldn't find cotton that was a colour I liked so the pale blue is not my first choice) and finding the necessary other bits and pieces.  I probably won't finish the crochet before the end of the holidays but I'll see if I get motivated!

Status update

Yes it is school holidays again which means I can dust off the project to-do pile and have something to blog about once more!

Although I've been off for a week now, things have been slow on the production front.  However, I did have a lovely time down at the Melbourne Craft Fair at Jeff's Shed (the Melbourne Convention Centre for non-Victorians).  I was relatively restrained but I did leave with two shopping bags full of bits and bobs that I'll get around to gushing about soon.

I have also spent the morning on a long needed project- sorting through my beading stuff and trying to get it into some sort of order.  A task that I had successfully achieved (including condensing things into two large boxes rather than two large boxes and one medium box), put everything away onto the shelf and- d'oh!- discovered a forgotten plastic storage box of misc beads.  Now to see if I can squeeze it in somewhere or if it is back to the drawing board.

I also discovered in the process that I have an awful lot of seed beads that are mostly still in their correct storage compartments.  Anyone who does beading will know the 'joy' of using those oh-so-useful divided plastic boxes only with lids that don't quite form a bead proof division all the way around in at the lid-divider junction.

The upshot is that for the next few weeks I'll have some projects to show either in progress or finished with instructions.  That's the goal, anyway!