Zine-a-riffic

Did you know that you, yes you, are capable of making an eight page book using any mere 8 x 10 sheet of paper?


Above is a template I've put together for how exactly you would go about it. 'Mountain folds', familiar to anyone with a childhood obsession with origami (like me), are folds where the paper, when laid flat on a table, peaks up towards you like a perfectly planar mountain range. 'Valley folds' are where the paper pokes down towards the table, creating a little trough.

Fold your paper into eight sections (half and half and half again) ignoring the direction the folds are going - any fold, once created, will happily accept either mountain or valley designations. Cut along the middle fold, NOT reaching the ends of the paper, where I have marked it above. Now fold the paper in half longways, so the cut edge is at the top of your 10 inch mountain range. Hold the paper at either end and push in, so the cut edge opens into a diamond shape and you hold a two-ply section in each hand. Push in until all four valley folds meet in the center of your paper cross. Now you can choose any of these quadrants as the front and back cover of your little pamphlet, and sandwich the rest of the pages between.

Below you will find a full sheet drawn by me on the back of a returned science quiz. This page was drawn to become a mini pamphlet, or as we krazy kids say, 'zine'. Print it out on a regular sheet of printer paper, making sure not to shrink the image and print as close to the edges of the paper as possible. Fold it as I've described above, and arrange the pages so that "FIRE!" is the front cover, and "NOW YOU WILL NEVER LEAVE ME, MY CHILD" the back. The image at the beginning of this post should end up as the centerfold.