Family Album Pop-Up Bookmaking.5 @ Queens Library 5/16/2023

 QUEENS PUBLIC LIBRARY

"Creative Aging: Virtual Family Album Pop-Up Bookmaking"

Tuesday May 16, 2023

Inspiring our participants to create their own work is our mission. Having learnt some of the basic techniques of pop-up book making, Beth wants to make a book for her grandson, and we were excited to hear her ideas. She’s thinking about how she can bring a paint box to life. As well, Beth shared her completed pop-up bedroom page, featuring “mirrored” closet doors made from shiny reflective paper and a colorful rug and matching bedspread. Her love of art was reflected in the Van Gogh painting she added to the wall behind her bed, downloaded and printed from the internet as well as a Van Gogh chair and vase.

 

Building on the skills learnt in the last two weeks of class, we made a series of different sized parallelograms, which became stairs. Warm up exercises included lifting our legs as though walking up and down stairs and stretching our arms, hands, and fingers to increase flexibility and dexterity. I shared my pop-up stairs page, which featured stairs leading to the ocean rock pool I swam in as a child on my local beach in Sydney. Our participants were asked to think about stairs which were significant in their memory, either from the past or now. What is the most unforgettable memory about the stairs you (used to) walk up/down? It could be the stairs outside or inside the building you live in right now or lived in before, or the stairs to your church or school. 

 

Spica demonstrated the steps in making the base page and the wall, which returning participants were now familiar with, but it is always helpful to review. Next, she asked them to select a different colored cardstock for their stairs and shared the template with measurements. Each stair is slightly smaller in size than the previous and is easily cut, folded along the score lines then glued with its tab, creating a perfect parallelogram, which when turned on its side becomes a stair. There are 5 stairs in total. 

 

Each stair is glued to the next and then the entire section is glued to the wall on either the right or left side. It’s important to ensure the stairs lie flat for effective pop-up when the page is opened. Pat chose a blue wall and attached a set of white stairs, while Beth chose a colorful combination of green base page, yellow wall, and orange stairs. 

 

In the final m moments of the class, Spica demonstrated how to make two boxes of different sizes which could be attached to the opposite side of the wall from the stairs and shared an image of herself as a child attached to one box holding an umbrella attached to the other. These examples should inspire our participants to add their own images to the boxes they create.