Remember a little while ago when I enlisted your help with a certain postcard-related wedding project? Get the details here, but for any newbies the gist is that, for our wedding guestbook, we invited guests to write little messages to us on my collection of art museum postcards.
Photos by Katie Stoops
We’ve since poured over the beautiful hand-written sentiments from our friends and family and definitely wanted to come up with a way to save them. My thought was to bind them in some way and turn them into a flip book. I got TONS of great inspiration from you guys, which I am SO so thankful for (we make a pretty great team, huh?). In the end, I went with Pietzi’s suggestion to bind them with washi tape, as seen here. The idea was to use colorful patterned washi tape to connect each postcard to the next, turning them into pages, and then sealing the “binding” with a big connected piece.
So I poured our pile of postcards onto the table and got to work.
First I came up with an order that I liked based on the art work on the fronts of the postcards. Being the perfectionist that I am, I wanted to mix up the modern art with the more traditional expressionist pieces for a good visual mix of art to browse through. Next, I grabbed my washi tape (first used in this project).
The process was pretty simple from there – I rolled out a length of tape to match the width of my postcards and connected the seams where they would flip naturally. As soon as I made the first binding, I got really excited…There was something really beautiful about the way the tape colors and pattern played off of the artwork, and even the black and white lettering on the note itself.
Once I had all of the pages connected and the tape trimmed to fit, it was time to construct one BIG piece of tape to stretch across the entire spine, holding everything together.
To do that, I rolled out several parallel lengths of the tape overlapping just a bit on each edge to create a super thick piece of patterned tape. I then stuck one edge to the top of the front postcard, and the back to the last postcard.
Here’s where I admit a minor oversight – Apparently having the ENTIRE thick “spine” tape sticky meant that the inside pages kept getting stuck and unstuck as they were flipped. I realized once I was finished and moved the pages that I should have made a SECOND piece of thick tape to adhere to the underside of the first, making more of a sturdy fabric-type material. The best way I can think to describe this is to ask you to imagine a hardback book. You know how you open it wide and can look down the spine and see out the other side? It’s more of a covering then the actual binding, which is done inside the pages.
So in the end, that’s what I did. I made an additional extra-thick tape piece, stuck it to the sticky side of the first to make one sturdy piece, and then cut off two thin sticky pieces to attach the whole thing to the front and back of the bound postcards. I know this seems confusing, but once you get down to it, it should make sense.
The finished postcard book is something we will treasure forever. I adore the extra punch of color that the tape gives the notes, and it also gives it that sweet little handmade touch that I love. It’s already sitting out proudly on an eye-level shelf in my studio for us to grab down whenever we feel the urge to reminisce.
Thanks again to everyone for their help on this to-to list item!! I definitely plan on keeping your thoughts in mind for future projects down the road…
P.S. Today is THE LAST DAY to enter the giveaway – Good luck!
