This is the easiest way to make master the art of book folding that you see on Pinterest, in around an hour – with free book folding patterns! I have made a bunch of these for friends and family, and they are always well received.
First off you are going to need to find yourself an old book, hardback works best, and you will have to make sure that you have enough pages for the word you want. For the patterns I’m giving away today I used a book of around 300 pages. So long as you count up properly you can always leave unfolded pages either side of your word, but more of that in a bit.
Choose your word/shape from the patterns below and print it out onto an A4 page. If you don’t see what you want you can email me directly as I have started selling them on eBay!
Just click to download the PDF



folding instructions in pdf form can be found by clicking the link.
Count both the black and white stripes, to get the number of pages you will be using. If your design has spaces between the letters just ignore them. Once you know how many pages you are going to fold you simply deduct this from the number of pages in your book and divide by 2. This is the number of pages in that you need to start folding from. *Remember that you are counting ‘leafs’ and not take the page number to mean anything… and yes I made this mistake first time I tried to figure it out!
The next stage is optional but it does make the finished item look neater so go on, take a minute to do it. Measure from the spine out by about an inch and draw a light pencil line. Do this top and bottom and use this mark to guide where you fold to – this gives a nicer finish than folding right up to the spine.
I fold the top of my paper over the page to get the word at the right height.
This a good stage to grab a cuppa, go for a pee or whatever, because in 5 minutes you are going to be scared to set it down!

Next is the fun part… for about 10 minutes. Then it gets a bit boring, so stick on your favourite tv show and settle in for a while. Put your pattern behind the page you want to fold (you can actually put it 3 or 4 pages back just to cut down on fiddling with it). Fold from the top of your first black line to your guide line near the spine. Do the same from the bottom of your first black line. You are now officially doing it! If you need to you can tick off the lines as you are doing it but you should be ok to keep going for a while.
Next you do exactly the same using the white line (okay it’s not really a line but you know what I mean). Then the black line, then the white line, then the black line… you get my drift?
Eventually your guide will touch the inside crease of the book so just trim it up so you can keep feeding it in and folding… and folding.

When you pattern calls for a top and bottom – like the ‘o’ in ‘love’ – simply fold one page to make the top, move onto your next line and fold the bottom.
That’s about it! You have folded your first (or easiest) book. No measuring and minimal maths!
I’d love to see what you did,
Nikki x
Edit to add: You can now buy custom words/patterns to use with this tutorial from my eBay. As ebay won’t let me send electronically you get paper in the mail. OR you can email me directly for the pdf by email and a reduced buying price!
Joined my first link up at Knick of Time