My side of every story: Want to learn with me? (Papier Collé

After some friends always tell me about how I should make tutorials about my craft works, I decided to share my journey through discovering how to work with Papier Collé.

I don't have any experience with this technique and all I know is what I saw on TV and some magazines.

After trying to clean the clutter at our closet, I took a look to a pile of very old books (they're from 1973, and it's even older than me, I'm from '75). They are about psychology, and completely out of date. A lot changed since then, and no one will want it. So, instead of just throw them away I decided to make something to recycle. First, I thought about making some baskets, using a "basket weaving" technique I'm used to make, using paper tubes.

But short little pages would make it a nightmare. Usually, making the tubes are the worst part of the job, if you're using newspaper and make long ones, or use magazines and short ones, but making it with a hand book size of sheet would be really time consuming in two ways, to make enough tubes, and after this, to weave them all and make the basket.

Then I was sitting at the sofa, watching TV and there's some craftworks tv shows, some of them are "latin" made (don't know in where), and other are made here in my country (Brazil), and there were a teacher showing how to work with carton sheets and torn pieces of paper.

After some thinking and some research about it, I found a recipe for a homemake glue, and decided to try it. Homemade glue has like almost no cost and the old books are here just cluttering.

This is where I started:

One book, and 3 pieces of cardboard box. "Professional" people use cardboard/carton paper you can buy at stores, with different weight/sizes/grams, but as I'm making a test and just trying to see how things works, I'm just making use of what I have on hand.

I measured the book cover, it's a hard cover one, and I'm taking advantage of them to make the base of my box. Took measure of a CD cover, as I decided to make a box to put them inside, and cut the cardboard.

Next, I made the homemade glue with this recipe:

1 cup of water
1 tablespoon of all purpose flour

Cook until thick. Let it cool a bit. Whisk in one tablespoon of common glue (this is optional) and don't forget to pour some kind of chemical thing (like bleach, or as I did, toilet cleaning product, without bleach, with flower scent... LOL, but if it kills germs in your toilet, may keep bugs away). Not much of that, just like a teaspoon. It looks like "gruel", and don't work as well as glue, put keeps things together... LOL.

At TV they work with masking tape, but, as I don't have it, and all I have is double-sided tape, I'm working with it and pieces/strips of paper.

All the time, the teacher was talking about making sure you need to cross the tapes, so that's why they are placed that way.

Like these. And, you can see that the pieces aren't really together, it has like a 2 millimeter space in between, so when I bend the tapes it will not rip away.

I placed the tapes with the corners on and took the first pic to show how the tapes should look. And this second pic is to show it "assembled". Thing is, I put the back/bottom of the box first, and then the sides, because it helps to make it easier to let assembled and work with the other side.

To fix the side corners I worked with both sides the at same time, like this: