OVERVIEW:
The Book-Making workshop is a hands-on activity that allows students to make a book. The basic book design is 
fairly simple. It’s essentially an 8.5 x 11 piece of card stock folded in half with 8.5 x 11 pieces of white paper inside to create the pages. The book is bounded by threading ribbon or yarn through holes punched parallel (but not on) the folded spine. The construction is simple, but can still yield a fairly elegant book. Additionally there is a great deal of room for students to improvise on the the standard (i.e. adjusting the size, threading their binding in different patterns, making different kinds of binding, etc.).
This craft-based workshop about the materiality of the book, which means it does not necessarily require students to work with written text. However the workshop can be combined with other activities and or lessons (both short-term and ongoing) that ask students to combine a consideration of the literary and the rhetorical with this exploration of the materiality of the book form. For example, during last the 2016 Art-a-Thon, the Typewriter activity and the Book Making workshop kind of unofficially merged when students in the Book Making workshops started commissioning poems for their books.
MATERIALS:
-heavy duty hole puncher (must be able to punch three holes at once). Department purchased one for the 2016 Art-a-Thon.
-Card stock (colors variety) for the covers
-plain white copy paper for the blank pages in the book
-yarn and ribbon for the binding
-decorating material (usually scrapbook decorative paper).
-paper cutter (for different size books)
-rubber cement and glue sticks
-exacto (sp?) knife (art knife) -totally optional but more than a couple students requested one. Basically it allows students to score the card stock in such a way that creates a more sophisticated binding that can actually hold more paper.
PROCEDURE:
Detailed Directions Forthcoming
EXAMPLES:
