Hey classmates! So, after hearing everyone's trials and successes trimming their books, I decided I had to try it out for myself. Plus, this gave the me the chance to finally test out the guillotine cutter in the lab and to make something I've been wanting to make for a while: a scrap paper sketchbook.
Since I was just doing this for myself, I decided to try hand-trimming two sides and then use the guillotine cutter for one side. Here's how it went:
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| First, I gathered a bunch of scrap paper that's been piling up and trimmed it by hand to be roughly the same size. Then I glued the straight side together. |
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| After the glue dried, I cut the top and bottom by hand. The top (above) went really well. I got a nice clean straight cut. Apparently it was beginner's luck. |
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| Trimming the bottom by hand didn't go as well. It wasn't awful, but it was sort of wonky. I was able to clean it up a little bit though, so not too bad. |
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| And then... the guillotine cutter! I lined everything up and the lab assistant showed me how to lower the part of the cutter that presses the pages together, and then pulled the lever. It was very cool. I actually wish I had more stacks of paper with me to cut. |
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| The only thing that didn't turn out 100% was that the edges on the last couple of pages were roughly cut and jagged. So, in the future, I'll have to pad the bottom with some throw-away paper. |
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| Here's the finished sketchbook! It's not perfect, but all the pages are fairly straight and they aren't falling out, so I'd call it a successful experiment. (For the cover, I used part of a cover from an extra paper sample book I had. I loved the texture and thought it would keep with the "scrap" theme.) |
PS - Jamie, that book sculpture by Robert The is amazing! It puts my first trimming attempts to total shame.
