A Rainbow Photo Album

Hello there :)
I have something a bit different today... it's a homemade photo album, something I've had in my mind to try for a while and when Tara added the Echo Park products to the store recently I knew the Camera die would be perfect to decorate the front cover :)

This post contains quite a few photos as I try to explain how I made it... it's certainly not a new idea and it's quite a simple design so hopefully I made it easy to follow!!!

First of all are the pages, I went with 14 pages in rainbow colours of medium-weight cardstock and they measure 10½ x 15cm. Fourteen is a good number because the zig zag binding edge can then be made from a strip of thin card thats 30cm in length (scrapbook cardstock) and just short of 10½ cm wide....

I used a score board to score the black strip at 1cm intervals and then a bone folder to help press the creases as I "concertina" folded it. I applied double sided tape to everyother fold on one side of the black card and flipped it over to do the same on the other side.

As you can see from the bottom two photos above, I have basically stuck all the valley folds together on the outside of the album spine which gives you 14 tabs on the inside of the spine to attach your colored pages to. I found the easiest way to do this step is to start at the back, remembering to leave a strip to attach to your back cover, and alternate between adhereing the valley folds and pages, definitely not as fiddly that way!!

Hopefully you can see what I mean in the bottom right photo which is a close up of the finished book spine before the front and back cover were added. The pages do spring round to make a carousel of colour which is quite pretty too :)

Onto the covers... I used thick cardboard, I hoard pieces from packaging and the backs of paper pads, it's perfect for these types of projects :) I covered them with thin white ribbed card.. ahhh just like those days of covering school exercise books ;)

Then its time to adhere the front and back covers to your album pages and this is what you should end up with..

To neaten the covers, I stuck a rectangle of card to the inside which covered the bare cardboard and black strip too.... et Voila... your album is ready for decoration :)

I die cut the camera and made it quite colourful to match the rainbow pages and used a speech bubble from Lawn fawn and Mama Elephants Smile sentiment too. I had a Bam bubble die cut lying on my desk so after cutting a rectangle into it, I placed it over the flash window on the camera... now there's some action going on :)

Well I hope that made sense and you give it a try... they make great gifts and can be left blank for the recipient to fill or you could go to town and fill the pages with photos instead :)

      

Thanks for stopping by :)

Jenny x

Anniversary Text!!!

Good Morning...

I suddenly realised that November starts at the end of this week and I have a clutch of Birthdays to make cards for coming up and my parents Wedding Anniversary too. I went straight to the "It's today right?" stamp set by Lil' Inkers.... I love the stick characters and the short sentiments in such a simple clean font...

I was inspired to make a text style conversation because those short sentiments just seemed to fit. Using Lawn Fawns 'A Birdie Told Me' dies I cut a couple of speech bubbles into a strip of black card.... to make the speech come from two different directions I simply flipped the piece and cut one from the back of the panel. 

I've stamped and embossed the main image and coloured the couple with Prisma pencils... they show up so well on dark card. 

I cut two more speech bubbles for the sentiments and adhered them straight onto the card base after using foam pads to raise the centre panel up... you can see the effect on this photo..

It needed a little something else so I used the line of dots in the stamp set to add a decorative border and of course..... a small die cut heart from my stash, smothered in Glossy Accents :0)

I'm still undecided if I'll send this to my parents or to go with something more conventional... I think the texting theme may just go over there heads.. Lol :0)

                         

As usual, I'd like to remind you of this weeks Paper Smooches Sparks Challenge which is a fab sketch, here's my take on it using the Christmas Words 2 dies...

We'd love to see you play along, check out the details and join us in the gallery :0)

Jenny x

Inspired Thank You's

Morning all :0)
I hope you had a good weekend and managed to dodge the storms!!! We were down in Witshire and had three inches of rain but arrived back in Cambridgeshire yesterday to 4mm!!! We should have collected some and bought it back with us for the garden... Lol :0)

Anyhow, onto my card today and it's a mad last minute rush for teacher Thank You cards but I found my inspiration on a recent shopping trip.....

and here's the notebook that gave me the idea....

Source

I love stationary and these jotter pads by Happy Jackson appealed to me with there bright speech bubbles so I thought I'd use the inspiration. The white panels are cut and mounted onto a piece of black card before die-cutting the speech bubbles from the panel. I then cut the speech bubbles twice in the four different colours and white embossed Thank You sentiments from different stamp sets onto each colour before sticking two bubbles together for extra thickness. Then I simply glued the panel to a card base and placed the bubbles into the correct spaces and embellished with black stamped stars.

I just need to make two more now and find some suitable gifts before Wednesday.... talk about a last minute Lucy!!!

Here are the stamps I used, click on an image to take you to the store :0)

                               

I'm on this weeks team for the Paper Smooches Sparks challenge and it's 'Anything Goes'... here's my card using Blossoming Buds and the Dots and Dashes dies .... more details on how I made it can be found on my blog :0)

I hope you'll have time to join in, see you in the gallery :0)

Jenny x