I've been busily and happily working on more flag books. The technique is simple but I feel it has great promise. While making a flagbook is easy, making it look like what you first envisioned is fairly complicated. In that first workshop I took (flag and tunnel books), we began with papers, mostly cut to size and easy instructions. Decisions only involved decoration. The book came out great. I made another flag book when I was up in Wisconsin; there was nothing critical about it. I looked at pictures of flagbooks which made use of photographs and realized how the photo would have to change on each "page" but still ignored how the book would open.

What I never thought about was how the depth of the accordion fold will change the way you see the flags. One of the books was not critical. For the flags, I removed the background from photos I took at a parade in Hikone, Japan, in 2007. Then I made backs for each image; not great, but passable. They look like paper dolls, or almost like baseball cards. I have an atlas, printed in Japan that I bought for a dollar and used pages from it to make the covers. It didn't matter that the accordion was too shallow.

The other book is for a birthday gift. I won't show you the finished book because I stole one of the images from the internet and can't find a way to credit or pay for it. I don't want to violate copyright by publishing it. The cover looks like this:

The outside is a light card stock with an embossed metallic finish. Inside endpapers are tie die paper I made in the book workshop. You can see the accordion at the bottom; the fold is only about half an inch. It should have been more like one and a quarter inches. Some of the words I put on the flags don't show up unless you move them. I have one more birthday book to make before I go to New York: that one will open properly.