Tiny Doll Books: A Fun & Easy Craft Project Made from a Scrap of Paper

This very simple tiny book is the right size for a doll and can be made from half a sheet of office paper, cut in half the long way (to 11 by 4 1/4 inches). It can be decorated with rubber stamps or pictures glued in or anything you like. This one has 16 pages, although 2 of them are the front and back cover. I used nice rag stationary and tore the edges to make them rough. This one was tea- stained and allowed to dry, which emphasized the torn edges.

1. The paper is then folded (see Illus. 2 for the template showing the folds, which are marked with dotted lines), first the long way and then it is unfolded.

2. It is then folded in half the short way, and then again and then again a third time, creasing the folds. It is then unfolded.

3. It is refolded in half one time the short way and cut with a pair of scissors along the long fold (marked with a solid line on the template) almost up to the ends, but not past the last folds at each end. And then it is unfolded!

The paper is then folded the long way (with the cut edge at the top) and then the pages are folded together like an accordion, into a little book. At that point the book is star-shaped, which is why these are sometimes called star books. The last page (here marked YAMA) is folded over to make the front cover, and then it looks like a regular book. The pages can be decorated any way you like. Illustration 3 shows the book completely unfolded with the pages ornamented. Notice that all the pages on one side of the long fold are upside down. When the book is folded in half along the long line, they all line up. For this book, I wrote in the names of the Indo-European language groups and then the cognate names of one of the gods for each of the languages, as many as I could find. I then stamped images that represented him (I didn't know I had so many cow stamps!), and added some ribbon bits and sparklies.

A tiny book like this can be bound by simply stapling it through the spine with a regular stapler. A safer way to put it together is to sew it with a needle and thread, especially if a child is going to play with it although this book is so small (1 3/8 by 2 inches) that a small child could eat it. To put it together permanently, some extra glue should be added with your finger to the inside of the pages near the spine to keep the accordion pages from falling out. But I like to keep futzing with it, so here I have used a decorated pin (Illus. 4 showing how the end of the pin appears inside) which can be taken out and then the book can be easily unfolded to show it's structure and contents. I used a gold-headed pin from one of those dollar sewing kits, and strung together some little beads, river pearls and a button on sewing thread and tied that below the head of the pin. I then glued into place a little wooden bead after sliding it up the pin to keep the bead string from sliding off.

You can make these books with even more pages, but because each page is double, they quickly get rather bulky. You can also make several sets of pages of the same size and sew them together like the quires of a regular book.