January Mini Album Tutorial

Hello, Diana here with this month’s Mini Album Tutorial; I like the variety of printed book covers 7 Gypsies has, but I don’t always like to use rings to hold the pages and I don’t own a binding machine. In this tutorial I’ll show you another way of using these nice covers.

The cover is 3.5” X 5.5”, I used paper from a 6” X 6” pad, I cut one side to 5” and folded them in half, and these are the pages for the inside of the book.

The next three pieces are going to join the covers. For the inside spine I cut a piece of cardboard 5.5” long and thick enough to fit a small eyelet,  I also cut a piece of paper to cover the side of the spine that will show from the inside of the album.  The paper that will go on the outside of the spine is 5.5” X 3.5”, I scored a 1” line for the part of the paper that is going on the front and left the back part longer, I scored another line a little bit wider than the cardboard spine. The image on the right shows how I punched a decorative border.

Once my three pieces were glued together I punched out two holes and added eyelets. This image shows the inside of the spine.

I glued the back cover.

And the front cover.

This is how the front looks.

I punched out two holes on the book pages and put a piece of ribbon through the middle of them, and then I put the ribbon though the holes in the spine tying a tight bow on the outside to secure the pages.

Here is the finished album.

This album is a gift I’ll be giving to my husband on our anniversary; the theme is the song The Story by Brandi Carlile that I dedicated to him, each page has a verse from the song.

Since the papers have so much decoration on them I left the embellishment simple and only used tags and paperclip dangles.

As always I hope I was able to bring some inspiration to your crafty world :)

Till next time.

=Di