Concertina revisited

15/07/2011 by UKMA 4 Comments

OK I’ve managed to do a PDF for the concertina album, using the old photos from the You Tube video.  I did my sidebar links in a weird way so I have to sort out if I can move the one there to the PDF section and then have an odd number of images (not sure about the HTML table with uneven rows) or if I need to add something that I didn’t think worth featuring when sorting the sidebar.

And I had said I had an idea for one with larger pages, but never made it.  Well, I did yesterday.  It was a bit of a struggle getting it to work out, figuring where the cuts went, then getting it slotted together (which was a LOT more difficult than the original – a trade off in that the original has very thin pages for the photos, unless you split them down the middle, but the bigger page on is a bear to assemble) but I love how it looks.

Here it is  – I still love Basic Grey and Lime Rickey has to be one of my faves.

You’ll notice that I made use of the printed sheet that displays the kit contents on the cover, and on some of the tabs. A great solution for using a lot of the patterns without cutting into a 12×12 sheet.

The “pages” take 3 x 6 photos and I like the bigger size.  Like the original, you have to pick it up and turn your head left and right to glimpse the photos clearly and the pages don’t so much turn as fan out. Which doesn’t bother me at all.

I organized it so all the left pages are DD and all the right ones are DS.  The song lyrics are printed on both sides of the tab.  It was a perfect choice for a lot of not great, face-making or goofy expression photos that I unearthed while sorting for the 4×6 Photo Love class I have mentioned a gazillion times in the past week LOL!

The spine, even though the pages are all identical in size, and the slits exactly measured and all the same, seems to result in back accordions that alternate slightly larger, slightly smaller.  No idea why.

You can sort of see that this way.  Actually, with 3×6 photo in landscape, this would be a cute way to display it, all fanned out.  But oh, the dust that would collect in it would be a nightmare.  I mean, I hate dusting on a good day, those surfaces I have to dust –  I don’t really think I want to add dusting the pages of a mini book in to that as well.

I did photo the process, but to be honest I’m just not sure if the end result is anything more than a novelty.  Don’t get me wrong, I love it, but I just don’t know how many people would bother.  It really is more about the photos, as you can’t really embellish inside. For so many people, minis are all about the cute. They are about embellished pages, lots of stuff, and the photos become almost an afterthought.  Don’t get me wrong, I’ve done that too, but now, more often the embellishments take a back seat to the photos.  Other than the cover, there are no embellishments other than the colourful tabs.

Which brings me to a question – I’m American, although we have lived here for 17 of the last 20 years. The lyrics are COLOR, in the American way.  But I spelled it COLOUR, because that is how I write it NOW so Brits don’t think I just can’t spell, or am lazy, and my kids spell it that way, so it makes sense.  So, true to how it is spelled, or true to how your viewers would spell?

In any case, here is the PDF for the original concertina. I’ll have a think and decide if doing one for this version is worth the time.