Sew Your Own: the pop-up book

As a keen book maker, I have become increasingly interested in how physical books are different from ebooks, and one of the best examples of that is the pop-up.

Exponents of origami will share my enthusiasm for the pop up, which in the hands of a master can be astonishing.

So: having previously printed off and hand-stitched and hand-bound a number of copies of my book Sew Your Own, I decided to make a first pop-up version, inserting a stiff card page in the centre, and a roughly drawn image much like the one of me on the cover of the book’s first edition. The mechanics of the pop-up are very simple, but I hope to do more complex ones in future.

Here’s the book closing up again:

Note: the spine is made from a scrap of Italian printed cotton, the rest of the cover is a pink shopping bag.