MakerSpace: Instagram Scrapbook and Mini Books (Book Making in the Teen MakerSpace at The Public Library of Mount Vernon and Knox County)

Sometimes you have one of those moments of serendipity. I had just gone through an ordered a handful of books about book making when a teen came into the Teen MakerSpace and made a book. It was a sign, so we created a book making station.

And because The Teen spent the first month of summer with me in the Teen MakerSpace, we set to work making an example. We ended up making three, because she kept making examples and I kept having mom moments and wanting to keep them. Then the MakerSpace Assistant Morgan came in and made an example that proved to be very meta: She made a DIY Book on making DIY Buttons.

Here’s how we set up our book making station in the Teen MakerSpace at The Public Library of Mount Vernon and Knox County (OH).

Supplies Needed:

• 1 piece of card stock weight paper for cover
• Regular or card stock paper for inside pages
• Duct tape, Washi tape
• Scissors
• Glue stick
• Ultra fine point Sharpie
• Instagram photos, sized 2 x 2
• Booklet stapler

Because we have fairly nice counters in the Teen MakerSpace, we found and use flexible plastic cutting boards as little stations whenever the teens are using Sharpies. We have found they work very well at protecting our surfaces.

Making Your Book Cover and Pages:

Cut all paper to a size of 7 inches long and 3 1/2 tall for 2 x 2 sized Instagram photos. You can adjust your paper size if you want to make larger books or use larger sized photos.

Fold in half and staple together with the page for your cover on the outside. A couple of staples right down your folded spine and now you have an empty book!

You can have as few or as many pages as you would like, with about 20 pages being an ideal size.

Filling Your Pages:

We glued a picture onto each page, but you can obviously fill your pages however you would like.

Decorate with tape and markers as you would like. This is where you have to get creative.

Create Your Cover:

Use various tape and markers to decorate your cover however you wish. We put a piece of duct tape on the outside spine to reinforce it and that’s the only real recommendation I would make.

Please note: You can make your scrapbook whatever size you wish, you just have to adjust all your measurements accordingly. You can also draw pictures  instead of using printed photos or use this book as a type of personal journal. Bullet journals are super popular right now and you can certainly make your own using the process outlined above.

We had quite a few teens come in who were interested in making their own books.

We then took a picture of each page of our DIY Button Book and used Giffer to make a little video of our book. I think you have to click on the image of the image to get the GIF to flip through the book.

As a librarian who is obsessed with pictures, I loved watching everyone make books. I highly recommend it. Plus, the materials aren’t that expensive. The teens were very excited to realize they could make graphic novel panels and make their own graphic novels. And if you wanted to up your tech component, you could have them make the pages digitally and then craft them together by hand.

Some of our book resources include:

Filed under: Makerspace