Multi-line folding!

18/02/2016 by UKMA 12 Comments

I made a multi-line folding alphabet, using the most popular font (and am working on a more plain version) but am nor quite to the final sharing point.  I have been super busy, and it is half-term week for DD this week, so it is all taking longer than I hoped.  MAKING it was a piece of cake, but composing a blog post to explain it all is a different matter. And I pre-stretched the letters so you can see the fold in proportion, just using the black lines.

Here are a couple of (flawed) samples.  Long time readers know my private subtitle for this blog is I make the mistakes so you don’t have to! and these show that pretty well.

First, I unfolded an old sample (a paperback) to test out a pattern:

Pretty good, but I mis-calculated the start page.  and I kept trying different things for the extra side pages where the words were shorter.  Still, not a bad first effort.

Then I worked out the right start pages and a side-fold for the extra bits that I liked well enough, but for the cutting into sections, I TOTALLY ballsed that up.  I know what I did – I didn’t mark the CUT LINE from the PATTERN, I marked the cutting line from the previous cut.  Than mean that if I didn’t have the previous page well place, every new mark was just that little bit off.  It went up and down like a mountain range!

I tried to sort it by cutting away a bigger gap but it still wasn’t right. The second cutting line was better, nearly perfectly straight, even if it seems less s in the photo.

And overall?

I am certain I can mask the wonky first cut with some ribbon across the divide, and I wish I had carried on with the original plan of making Lots with a capital L, making the first and last line virtually the same length, so the side folds were only in the middle section. But as a test to see how it works, I learned a lot.

So, once I can take the time to explain how to use it, this is what the PDF looks like. Sorry, still not willing to do the counting, but I can better explain why! You can see the s, for example.  If your book was right on the edge of having enough pages, can you see how it would be very easy to omit the 10 folds at the end and make it 47 folds, rather than 57?

You can make note of that on the count page for future reference.  And maybe you can also see where some breaks are SO CLOSE together, they COUD be counted as a single fold instead of two?  the end of the s and its tail in the above sample? That sort of thing is personal preference and specific to the folder and the book she uses.

Your count sheet will be specific to you.  Plus I still don’t want to give a wrong count and ruin someone’s work {wink}

This is what the PDF will look like

 

I added numbers and some special symbols as well.  Watch for it in the next day or so – I just need to carve out a little bit more time to finish up!