ALTERED FILE FOLDER (AFTER BOHEMIAN CRAFTING) – PREPARATION
Preparing the folder
I follow Eva of Bohemian Crafting on YouTube. She makes gorgeous mixed media interactive objects – books, folios, all in a grungey vintage style which is right up my street. At the moment I am following along as she alters a file folder. I was able to find exactly the same file folders that she used on Amazon, but the blue ones were much more expensive than the bright yellow ones, so I opted to buy those, knowing that I could “grunge them up” all right. I had to buy a box of 10, though, so I’ve got my work cut out to alter them all!
There is an additional page inside, and there are two tabs, and two metal pieces to attach loose papers.
I shall follow Eva’s design for the first one, and with subsequent ones I may choose a different format. Eva trimmed off the top section of the folder, and retained the smaller portion in order to make pockets later on.
I knew I had to do something about the garish yellow straight away, and initially I planned to keep the colour scheme brown, but I really liked what Eva was doing with the blue ones. I began by painting gesso around all the edges of every page, and also the spine, and then added various brown Distress Inks, darkening the edges.
The inner page is brown card, which I could have left as-is, but I wanted to keep the pages the same as much as possible.
The next step was to go round the edges and distress them some more, using a grunge stamp with archival sepia ink.
These are the top sections, distressed in a similar way.
It was at this point that I decided to add blue. I had to use quite a few different shades in order to get the desired colour, and the brown page did behave slightly differently from the yellow one, despite the gesso. Here are all the pieces with blue added, and ready for further work.
A detail of the distressing, and the file tabs.
Problems with the spine
I had misgivings about the spine from the outset. It was bright yellow and quite shiny. Gesso normally goes onto shiny surfaces pretty well and provides a good base for any further media. The brown ink I had added over the gesso didn’t seem that stable, and I was able to scratch it off pretty easily. In her video, Eva got around the problem by painting it with alcohol ink. She had the advantage of beginning with a blue spine which just needed to be grunged up a bit. I used a piece of kitchen paper to scrub off the gesso and ink I’d put on my spine, and this took off the yellow as well, leaving it more or less white. I added some brown alcohol ink and this seemed to work OK, but it was much too strong. I decided to add blotches of blue to blend a bit with the brown. When I unscrewed the top of the blue ink bottle, the bottom of the bottle cracked right off, covering my hands with strong blue ink! I managed to avoid getting it on my project although there were one or two splashes at the edge of the spine. I set it down and proceeded to mop it up with kitchen paper. I had no way of rescuing what ink was left, and nothing to put it in, so the whole thing got wrapped up with kitchen paper and put in a plastic packaging bag that was already in my bin. I then proceeded to spray the area, and my hands, with alcohol, and wiped up the mess. I wasn’t able to clean my hands completely, and around my nails there is still a lot of staining, but this will wear off eventually, I suppose!
The alcohol ink idea really wasn’t going to work for my spine. I decided to cut a piece of roofing felt (the builders gave me a large offcut when they were doing our roof when we moved here) – it has a soft fabric feel with a mock woven texture, and it makes great material for book binding as it is soft, paintable, and extremely strong, and won’t fray. I cut a piece to size and painted it with black acrylic paint, and set it aside to dry. I will be adding some blue in due course. This piece will be set aside and not stuck to the project until the very end. There is a kind of accordion fold in the spine to allow for expansion of the folder when you put things into it, and the whole thing is pretty wobbly and unstable since I tore some pieces out. Once I know how thick the folder is when it’s complete, I shall fold this piece of roofing felt around it and glue it to the front and back covers of the folder, leaving the actual spine free. This should stabilise the whole thing as well as improving the general appearance of the folder.
The addition of blue ink to the pages was very successful, and it also muted the stamping a little, which looks better.
Assembling the folder
The next step was to assemble the basic structure of the folder by adding the pieces that had been cut off at the beginning. Here is the front cover. The folder will open from the top. You can see the state of the binding – still partially stained with alcohol ink, which has spilt over onto the card of the folder a little. This will all be covered up.
The first of the cut off pieces had its projections trimmed off, and I scored and folded a hinge at the top. I glued it close to the fold of the binding.
The flap lifted up.
Eva constructed a couple of pop-ups to be operated by the lifting of the flaps, but I didn’t think they were working too well, as they appeared to need some assistance in order to close the flap. I have made that particular pop-up myself in the past, and could possibly adapt it to make it work better, or I may do something entirely different. That’s all for a later stage, anyway.
The second flap is attached to the opposite side of the page from the first one, for added interest. On the previous page, seen at the top in this photo, the third and final piece trimmed off the original file folder, was folded at the sides and glued down, leaving the top and bottom open. Eva also showed how to make the indentation at the bottom, using the envelope punch board, which gave a very nice result.
Here is the second flap, lifted up.
The back cover. You can see what a mess the spine is, and quite a big blot of blue ink on the left. The spine definitely needs to be stabilised to stop the accordion folds folding the wrong way.
Another thing that I did was to round off the corners where the folder had been trimmed.
I measured the various pages and flaps, so that I would know what papers to cut to cover them. Some of them will need to be cut from card as they will form pockets, but some will simply be glued down completely, so paper will suffice. I am going to search through some of my vintage printables for backgrounds, with text, or perhaps maps. I have plenty of collage fodder for decorating and embellishing the various parts. Eva has made some gorgeous additions, including quite a complex interactive structure for the front cover, with envelopes and pockets for additional ephemera.
When I make another of these from the garish folders, I shall most probably use acrylic paint to colour the pages as this is quicker and less labour-intensive than inking. So far, I am pleased with the blue and brown. I can see myself making an album from more than one of the file folders. There is plenty of scope, and the folders are made of good substantial card which makes a good base.
