A phase box is one that wraps itself around an object and opens to a flat sheet. It can be made in hard grey board or out of thin card as shown here. It is fairly straightforward to make and a useful way to wrap your favourite books.
1. Start by measuring and making a plan on a scrap of paper. Measure your book width, height and side depth. (Round up your measurements to the nearest millimeter.) Sketch a plan of five boxes as shown and jot down your measurements along side. In the spaces jot down the side measurements: between boxes 4 and 2 and 2 and 5 and 2 and 3, the side will measure the depth of the book (7mm in this case). Between 1 and 2 add 1mm (8mm).
Add up all the measurements to work out how big a piece of card you will need and cut it to the exact size. I used 300gsm card.
The total size of the card was width (10.1 +0.8+10.1+0.7+10.1) = 31.8cm x height (7.6+0.7+7.6+0.7+7.6) = 24.2cm.
This looks complicated but if you draw the plan it will seem a lot easier and you can use a calculator to add up the numbers. Just be careful with centimetres and millimetres.
2. Score a grid on the back of your thin card using all the measurements in your plan. Mark them up accurately at first then score.3. Cut away four corners as shown.
Make the folds, press them with a bone folder and check that the box fits around your book.
4. A simple closure is the called the tongue and slot method. On the outermost phase, draw a tongue. This could be one third of the book wide and one third in height for example. Cut away the shaded areas. Snip a small amount off the sharp corners so they don’t get damaged and to make it easier for the mechanism to work.5. Close the box around the book and mark up for the slot with two pinholes at those inner corners of the tongue.6. With a sharp blade, cut the slot between the two pinholes to make it the same thickness as the card (so probably two cuts).
