Jacob's Ladder Book(s)

Here's another of the little books that will eventually make up my larger Carnival project for the BEST contest. This one is based on a Jacob's Ladder toy. I was originally just going to make plain boards covered in paper but I didn't want to make something that boring and didn't really have enough decorative paper for all the borders, never mind the amount of ribbon putting it all together to be big enough.


So after plenty of staring at the already cut boards (of course I started before I figured out what I planned to do) while watching Secert Diary of a Call Girl (bit distracting) I decided to make a series of books. Two hours spent pretending I was going to go to sleep and not getting anywhere I'd decided to alternate black and red paper, and decorative and plain paper. This was in order both to make my little bit of remaining paper to go further, and because, given that the books have a very obvious front/back the ladder would not work quite the way the toy does and give the illusion of one block falling all the way to the bottom. I opted to go for confusion instead (which still fits very nicely with the overall theme of the larger project because carnival is about disguises, wonder, anarchy and all that other good stuff). I was going to checkerboard it, but the like the idea of it flipping back and forth between the colours better.

So, there you are. It actually didn't take nearly as long as I thought to put the whole thing together. The majority of the work on this was simply the figuring out how and what to do. I'm very pleased with the result, everything works together very nicely. The only thing is - it doesn't actually work. The books open so you can't actually make them fall like dominoes, you have to flip it one at a time. So it's really just a complicated series of miniature double-hinged books. But still, it's pretty cool. I think it might be worth some more experimenting, maybe with just three books and more strands of ribbon. I also don't think I'd put the ribbon the outside cover next time around, I just did it here to mimic the toy. What do you think?