Recycled Mini Album Tutorial-This & That

Hello and Welcome to April’s Mini Album Tutorial.

This month we celebrate the Earth, I’m sure most of you apply at least one of these to your daily life: Reduce, Reuse and Recycle. With today’ Mini Album we’ll be using all three of them.

Reduce: the pieces of Pattern Paper you have in your scrap stash.
Reuse: a pair of old and torn Jeans.
Recycle: a piece of Card box.
You will also need: Fabri-Tac and embellishments for your album cover.

Why the title This and That? Because this mini will be a home to all those extra photos that don’t make it to a layout or an album.

Are you ready to turn this:
Into This:

*Album Cover

My Album cover is 7” X 7” I won’t give you measurements so you can make the album the size you want, but keep in mind that the longest piece of paper in your scrap stash might be 12” and you’ll need to fold that in half.

Step 1:
To make the Front and Back Cover cut 2 equal size pieces from the card box and 1 thin piece for the album Spine.
Arrange the pieces on the fabric and cut leaving at least 2” on each side to fold.

Step 2:
Adhere the pieces to the fabric using Fabri-Tac, start with the spine, and then attach the cover pieces on each side. Cut the corners in an angle for an easier fold (sorry I did this step backwards)

Step 3:
Adhere the fabric flaps tucking in the corners.

*Album Pages

Arrange the paper in the order you want them to appear, make the Crease of your first page in the same thickness as your cover spine, the next page should be just a slight thinner, continue this process with all the pages, they do not need to have an equal size, the unevenness gives a nice look to the album.

*Making the End sheet

This will help us join the book block to the cover, and it should be only slightly smaller then the open cover. Make sure the Crease is also as thick as the spine piece and centered.

Time to put the paper together, add glue to the Creased folded part of your first page, and adhere it to the End sheet. Continue gluing all the pages together.
Give your album more personality adding some tags and envelopes.

Now that your book block is complete and dry, it’s time to adhere it to the cover. You’ll only add the glue on the back part of the End sheet, start with the spine, then the back cover and finally the front cover.

*Decorating the Front Cover

Here comes the fun part.
I added the jeans pocket and tucked a Donna Downey Canvas Tag inside. The birds and bird cage is a Donna Downey iron on, some brads, flowers, ribbon, gems, alphas and my cover was ready.

Here are two more ideas on how to Reuse the jeans fabric.

I made this little notebook using the same technique of the above mini album but without a book spine. The inside is made out of white paper folded in half and stapled in the middle. I'll be using this book for my grocery lists.

And finally these flowers, don’t they look cute made out of blue jeans?

And there you have it, a few ideas on how to recycle those old pair of jeans.

As always I’ll have this complete tutorial posted at our Scrappy Community for future reference.

Have a Great day and Go Green! :)

=Di