Blizzard structures

Hedi Kyle is the coauthor, with her daughter, Ulla Warchol, of The Art of the Fold, a step-by-step guide to making a wide range of original structures.

Over the past 3 weeks I’ve been exploring 6 of her designs based around the concept of Blizzard books. Each one below, with the exception of the Crown Card, start with a 16 fold accordion and are experiments to see how and if my prints can be incorporated in the future – either as the structure or as inserts.

Blizzard Book

This piece is designed to insert business card sized items and has a fully removable cover. It’s essential to have fairly long overlapping folds top and bottom (which fold over the pages creating the pockets) to hold any inserts securely in place. This means that the paper you start with should be at least 3 times the height you want the final piece to finish up.

To scale this up would involve large sheets of paper but the structure is very robust once constructed. I can see this being useful for SMALL individual removable prints within each pocket.

Wheel of Fortune

Of the 6 designs this would be my least favourite. It looks effective, especially the orientation of the one on the right, but for my purposes the pockets are so tiny nothing much could be inserted. The folds over the central pockets hide much of each pocket making the insertion of other items meaningless.

It was a fun exercise but to scale this up would require huge sheets of paper and the folds would still overshadow the pockets.

Crown Book

The left-hand image is the one I’ve just made. It has a narrow concertina spine with the long length of paper enabling a double (folded) cover to be created from the same sheet.

The pages are, again, long sheets folded to size. In this case I used 2 sheets for the pages, each one folded to create 4 double sided pages. The beauty of this book is that the top and bottom folds of the spine between each page hold them in place. If necessary a small tab of double sided tape will stop the first and last pages from popping out.

The image on the right is one I made a while ago, using the same concept but with a hard cover and individual bi-fold folios as the pages. With this method you need to glue or stick each of the pages in place or they pop out.

This new method of creating multiple pages from a single long sheet is definitely an improvement on the structural integrity of the book form I achieved last time. As long as prints or other imagery can be positioned correctly, where folds are made, this one is a winner.

Crown Card

This form is the only one of the set not using a 16 fold accordion. They were quick to do, effective and have scope for printing either on the covers or the page insert. It’s easy to calculate how much paper you need to scale up or down. Another good option for me to use.

Blizzard Boxes

These were interesting to construct and quite surprising when they opened up into sets of 3 boxes. I can see these lying down with concertina books spilling out of each or standing up with small books nestled within the compartments.

I’ll have to do calculations re scaling up and using single-sided patterned paper to gauge effects. I love the fact that they fold all the way down to the size of one box side.

Blizzard Pockets

The left-hand piece has been made using glassine as the pages, hence the reason the folds can be seen within the page structures. The one on the right is lightweight butcher paper. Normally the covers would be removable but I found the pages sat better if the doubled cover had a tab of double-sided tape to hold the front and back page in place.

You can see that gussets have been created top and bottom of each section creating pockets.

These could be a new way for me to display a set of themed prints, each one removable for easy viewing. The construction is fairly easy to scale and more pages could be added.

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