Have fun, and don’t forget to come back and post a link to your finished photos—or, you can upload them to the Make It Mondays Flickr photo pool.

Does anyone else have one of these? Do you like it? What have you been doing with it?

These two books are made from printed gift boxes and leftover ribbon. My idea is that you’ll hit the dollar stores early, pick out the prettiest printed boxes you can find, use them to hold Christmas gifts for your family, and as soon as the boxes are emptied, snatch them up again, and recycle them into little books. They can hold prints of holiday photos for relatives far away, or CDs of photos if that’s how you roll. You can make little books to use for notes or test swatches of new techniques. You can gluebook in them, journal in them—whatever.

So, here’s how they go together:

Start with some printed gift boxes. I got this four-pack of medium boxes at the dollar store. Go early, because they always blow out of them quickly.

When Christmas is over, collect the boxes. You’ll need a top and a bottom for each book. Flatten the boxes out by cutting them at the corner folds.

Figure out how big you want the finished book to be, and do a little measuring. If your print is directional, be sure you’re working so the pieces end up oriented in the right direction. Start by cutting a straight line for the bottom edge of the book’s front cover, removing the bottom fold of the box

For this book, I’m going to make the pages half a sheet of paper. Covers should always be just a tad bigger than the pages, to protect the edges of your work. I placed a page on the printed side of the box, and used it as a guide for cutting, leaving just a bit extra around three sides. The fourth, left side will be where the binding is, and that’s where you don’t need the covers to extend beyond the pages.

Use the front cover as a guide to cut the back one. They should be the same size.

I used the fold line on the side of the boxes as part of my cover design, since the height of the orginal box was the right size for a binding section. For my half page-sized book, a fold of roughly 1-1/2 inches was just fine. You can choose to trim your fold off completely to do a flat book, or make it narrower or wider. It’s your book, so you decide. If you’re going to use a fold, give it a good crease now.

I decided to line the inside covers of my book with pretty papers, because the bare chipboard seemed to clash with the print of the front of the book, and the stark white of the back. If you’re using a pattern that looks good with plain chipboard, you can go without. Again, it’s your book, so you decide. If you want an inside cover lining, just apply some paper with a glue stick, then trim it to the size of the covers.

There are quite a few different ways to bind these books. You can tie them with ribbons or fibers, use binding rings, brads, or screw posts, or do a stick binding. Check the decos and small books section for a bazillion different binding techniques.

I chose to punch holes, and use ribbons to tie my books. First, I marked the holes with pencil, measuring to be sure they were centered on the fold, and equidistant from each edge. I also made sure that my holes were placed so the pages would be punched securely.

I punched holes as marked through both covers.

Next, I prepared the pages. For most booklets, that just means cutting a stack of them the right size. However, if you’re making something that will hold photos, recipe cards, or other bulky items, it’s best to cut the pages a little long, and fold them on the spine edge to create a spacer that will give a little ease between pages.

If you’re really into bulky stuff, do a double fold at the spine edge, to give yourself two layers of spacers. This way, your book will lay flat when it’s full, instead of turning into a wedge shape or a fan that never closes.

Line the pages up on the cover, and use one page as a template, marking where the holes should be.

Punch through all the pages, using the same template.

Line all the holes up on the back cover.

Place the front cover over the pages, and clamp the whole book to hold everything in place while you bind. I use kitchen clips or clothes pins for this.

For fun little books used for a short time, it’s fine to use gift wrap ribbons for the binding. If you’re planning to keep the book for a long time, those ribbons might not be strong enough, and might not look pretty after a while. Try satin ribbons or twine instead.

Re-curl the ribbons once they’ve been threaded through the holes and tied in a double knot.

As I’m writing this, Go Make Something has over 1,600 approved comments posted by users. Like many blog owners, I moderate comments, so they have to be reviewed before posting—which means not everything that’s submitted gets posted.

I often think, as I’m flipping through comments, that people don’t realize what they are, and what they aren’t. Maybe this will help those folks along:

Comments should be just that: comments. They’re not supposed to be War and Peace. They’re not a tool for your to use to post your life story. They should be sentence or two, giving your thoughts on what you’ve just read. If you have more than a few sentences, perhaps your comment should become a post on your own blog. I do this a lot on my personal journal—leave a comment under the original post, letting the blogger know that I’ve read it, and I’m writing my response in my own blog, because I have a lot to say.

Comments should be relevant to the post on which they’re left. I delete dozens of comment submissions every day that have nothing to do with the posts under which they would appear. For example, if you leave a comment on this post, it should be about THIS post—not about something you’ve seen elsewhere on the site. If you have a comment about the Surprise Balls article, go to that article, and use the comment form on tat page—don’t leave it here.

Comments should be about the content, not about you. I delete a lot of comments that are all about the person who posted them, and have nothing to do with the article on which they’re posted. If you want to write about yourself, why not write on your own blog? The exception to this would be if a blogger asks you to leave information about yourself—like my current giveaway at Ten Two Studios, where I ask for comments about your favorite Christmas memories.

Comments should be exactly what you’d say if you were speaking to the blogger, face to face. The Internet often gives people a feeling that they can say anything they wish, with no recriminations. If you wouldn’t say it to me if we were face to face, why on earth would you leave it as a comment on my blog? Things that are mean, rude, confrontational, or that are aimed at the poster or other commenters more than the post should be left unwritten. Think whatever you like—don’t leave it as a comment. It might come back around and bite you later.

Today’s example of this: someone hit the Surprise Balls article this morning, and left the comment “you’re all idiots”. I’m assuming she meant that the folks who had left previous comments before her were idiots, but she could have been calling me one, too. What’s the point of leaving a comment like that? It has nothing to do with the article, and it certainly isn’t going to be approved to appear on the site.

Comments should not be used as a tool to promote your own site, blog or business. I delete all comment submissions that are nothing more than “visit my site” messages. However, there are plenty of links to other people’s blogs on this site, left with comments. If you look at the comment form on this post, you’ll see there’s a place to fill in a web site address—most comment forms have this. When you leave a comment, this converts your name to a link to your site. Leave a relevant comment on a properly filled in comment form, and it’s a good way to get a link to your site posted. Leave a comment form that does nothing but pimp your site, and most bloggers will do what I do: delete it, while quietly calling you ugly names under her breath.

Ideally, comments should be positive and helpful, as long as the post is positive and helpful. If a blogger has written an article you find helpful, or posted artwork you enjoy, leave a positive comment to encourage her to do so again.

Did that help? Feel free to leave your thoughts on this post!

One of the most annoying things I encounter is blogs that have added auto-start music to their templates. These sites are slow to load, because they have to load up a music player, and they’re loud enough to make my dog bark. If I’m really interested in staying on the blog, I have to hunt down the player, and switch it off. More often than not, I just abandon the site to shut the music off.

If you have a blog, and have added music to it, please, please, PLEASE don’t set it to start as soon as the page loads. It’s startling. It’s annoying. It’s not workplace-friendly.

Just say no to music on blogs!

The annual printable image countdown to Christmas will begin on December 1st. Each day until Christmas, a new printable image will be revealed. Previous countdowns have included collage images, gift packaging, tags and tag pockets, faux postage stamps—well, pretty much anything that falls out of my head onto my graphics tablet.

The countdown happens here. Bookmark that page, post a link to it on your blogs, and then get ready to download an armload of printable images!

Under the terms of use, reposting any content from Go Make Something is prohibited. Capturing images, uploading them to your blog and using them as eye candy is also prohibited. The images on this site are meant for use on this site only.

In general, if an image is not your original work, don’t post it. So, if you’d like to link to, say, the Surprise Balls article, why not just make a suprise ball of your own to show off, instead of stealing the photo of mine?

Having said that, there are ways to use images that aren’t yours in your blogs. Flickr has a very handy Blog This option that allows you to post images someone else has uploaded to Flickr. If the Blog This option appears above the image, it means the person who has uploaded it is OK with it being blogged. If it’s not there, it’s been turned off, and you’ll know that you shouldn’t use it. (This does not mean you should capture images from other people’s sites and upload them to Flickr to use them. That’s prohibited by Flickr’s terms of use.)

I often showcase groups of images from Flickr using badges—basically, a visual RSS feed of the image group I’ve chosen. This is more technical, but if you know how to work with badges and feeds, you’ll be able to work it out. This is a handy community feature of images uploaded at Flickr.

There you go. Miss Manners says don’t use other people’s images unless their sites offer a community function that allows image sharing.

Over the course of moving from site to site, and changing from static HTML pages to Greymatter to blogging with WordPress, some things haven’t changed. There are certain basic ideas that used to be called nettiquette that haven’t changed in all the years of been writing. They’re the Internet version of say please and thank-you, don’t talk with your mouth full, and don’t cut in front of people in line.

And now, I’m going to write about them.

I decided to start adding articles about blogging ettiquette to this site simply because so many people now have art blogs. It seems like most of the members of my favorite arty groups all have them, in one form or another. It’s become so simple to set up a blog without ever visting sites that teach about writing online, that most people never learn those basic rules of blogging ettiquette.

Even those who don’t have blogs need to know a little nettiquette. If you visit blogs, leave comments, or want to share ideas from a blog with an online group, there’s a right way and a wrong way to do those things.

Rather than continue shaking my head as I surf, I decided I would write down what I know, to help those who haven’t read dozens of articles about online communication catch up. I want everyone to be a good blogger or blog user, and to have a successful experience—so, maybe some of the stuff I’ve picked up over the years will come in handy.