Last year, I started reserving a day in each of my Shakespeare courses for students to "make" quartos. I wrote at some length (almost exactly a year ago) about the experience of making Q1 Hamlet with my students at VCU and posted instructions, information about supplies for the activity, and a link to the sheets (which I made from EEBO printouts).
This semester, I'm teaching a senior seminar called "Early Modern Drama: Manuscript, Print, Performance" that focuses on the material-textual processes that facilitated the making of theatrical performance and printed texts of the plays. So far, my students have reverse-engineered scribal backstage plots of Doctor Faustus, performed a scene from the same play using cue scripts, and "made" quartos.
The final products.
Although we did study Q1 Hamlet at the beginning of the semester, I decided to use a different play for the quarto activity. Q1 Phylaster seemed like a good choice for a couple of reasons. First, unlike Q1 Hamlet, it has page numbers. Initially, my students thought this would help them fold the sheets—until they realized that the page numbers were full of mistakes and that the signature marks provided better guidance. Secondly, it seems like printer Nicholas Okes probably printed the illustrated title page and the dramatis personæ last—on the same sheet as sigs. K1. This complicated the folding and assembly process since students had to figure out that they needed to cut that sheet in half—K1 for the back of the quarto (with a blank page for protection) and the title page for the front of the quarto (again with a blank page for protection).
You can find the sheets that I created for this activity here and the instructions here. Please feel free to use/modify this assignment in your own classes. If you do, I'd love to hear your feedback.