Enchiridion Jewelry Box

I had a flash drive I was sending to a friend and I wanted to package it nicely. Having just watched some Adventure Time, a little Enchiridion box was the first thing that came to mind.

I had fun making it, and it turned out alright but I wish I had made it a couple millimeters thicker (I was sick of cutting out pages).

This was an afternoon-evening project taking about 6 hours and costing maybe $5.00 for the paper.

The materials used were pretty slim, just the usual suspects.

• Assorted Cardstock
• Glue
• Knife
• Scissors

I was going to start with the front cover but decided the pages would form a nicer base to work off of. I cut out 25 pages but like I mentioned I think it was too thin, maybe 35 pages would be better.

Cutting out the center of the pages was boring and was the deciding factor in me not making the book thicker.

The Enchiridion is a well used book and has a couple bookmarks and loose pages. Cut out some right angle triangles to paste in as loose pages. I left a whole page on the bottom, you could just leave it open to the back cover if you want.

Glue all the pages into a big stack, inserting extra's as you go. By the end it will look more like a book!

I offset each page a bit so that the book would look well used and broken in, but this resulted in the pages being all jagged where they were supposed to meet the spine. To ameliorate this I just spent some time with the knife cutting away the protruding pages.

The covers are a little bit larger than the pages. I used one of the leftover pages to size the cover. Each cover consists of a folded over sheet of cardstock. The front cover has a bite torn out of the bottom corner, cut it out. There is an inner panel in the front cover, it has sustained some minor damage to the bite area. Just improvise a bit with your scissors and then glue it all together.

The spine was a little tricky to fold into shape, I scored the left and right sides of the spine and then just worked the paper around a ruler to get it to bend nicely. To attach it to the pages and get it to open nicely, I cut out an extra page with an extension on the left.

The purpose of the extension is to insert into the cover and glue. In this way the spine of the pages are not glued to the cover spine, and it can open nicely.

Glue the extension to the front cover and while it is still wet insert the dark brown bands into the spine. Glue the bands down, and then glue the back cover over top of them.

The light brown inset has been glued down at this point. It turns out that was foolish. You should do the writing part (Step 12 at this point so as not to ruin your Enchiridion.

The cover has some metal parts around its edges, cut and glue, very straight forward. You will need 7 of the [L] shaped pieces and 4 of the smaller ones.

The center of the front cover has a segmented stone? ring with gems inset on each piece. I used some plastic caps from the recycling bin to get accurate circles. Make two identical rings, the first needs notches cut out of it to represent the segmentation, and the second can be cut up and pasted on top to raise the segments up a bit.

The skull, grapes, and bird were all pretty easy to make. I made the grapes about twice as big as the should have been and had to redo them.

The sword took a little more work to do. It has multiple pieces and I wanted the blade to be flat so I had to cut out each half of the blade and paste them onto a smaller piece together. It's hilt ended up a bit too small, but I don't think it's noticeable unless you have the reference material to look at.

The shields were also a bit tricky. Similarly to the sword, I wanted them to be flat and not have the colours raised up. To do this I had to quarter them and piece them together. The result is not perfect and you can see the cracks between the pieces in the finished version :(

Glue it all into place.

Use a fine black pen to add some marks.

I think this is enough explanation.

I am unhappy with this part of the book.

I went over the area in pencil first, and then erased it so it was only faintly there. The pen I used went on nicely, but didn't dry perfectly on top of the graphite. When I went to erase any leftover pencil it smeared the pen a bit. Then I was sad :(

If you are making this, cut out a bunch of light brown insets and don't glue the light brown inset down until you are happy with the writing. It it goes poorly, just toss it and try again.

Put something inside it and send it away.