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

Recycled Tins

Earth Day is Apr 22nd, and for all this week we will be posting ideas about how we can use our Craft to Recycle. We already have all the decorative supplies in our scrappy stash, so now just look around your house to find interesting objects to be altered. Today I’ll share these cookie Tins, although they were already beautiful I decided to add a few extra embellishments to make them more decorative. You can also cover the tin with pretty pattern paper. For the body I added three crocheted doilies and tied a ribbon in a bow. I decorated the lid using the pretty pattern it already has adding only two flowers and a chipboard bird that I painted using chalk ink.

I like how these two tins have similar colors, so I tried to embellish them in a similar way.

As the previous one I tied a ribbon in a bow around the body of the tin, it has so many pretty details I did not want to cover.

I covered the lid with a crocheted doily, added some flowers, a chipboard butterfly that I sprayed with some glimmer mist and as the final touch a cute metal owl.

These two tins will hold some of my vintage embellishments, and will add a nice decorative look to my scrappy space.

Best start of the week wishes, and Think Green ;)

=Di

The Bargello Technique

Hello bloggers! Today I wanted to share a technique with you called the Bargello Technique. I found a wonderful tutorial from Splitcoaststampers. Splitcoast has a wonderful resources section on so many techniques. Make sure you check it out sometime! I had never heard of this technique before and I was excited to give it a try. 1. To start, you need at least 4 pieces of patterned paper. Mine is from Cosmo Cricket. I cut mine 5 inches by 6 inches. 2. Next, cut 3/4 inch strips. I cut two of each paper.

3. Then I used a random, old piece of paper to glue my strips on. Don't use anything thick as your backing. You will need to cut these and things will be easier if you don't make it thick.

5. Once you have all your strips adhered to a paper backing (remember to let glue dry first if you use glue), cut various thicknesses of stips.

6. Once you are finished cutting, you can arrange the strips anyway you like! Play around with your arrangement.

7. I wanted to use a diecut on my pattern (optional of course. You could use it as a full background if you wish) so I did adhere my strips on top of another piece of paper like I did before I cut my stips initially. I learned the hard way that cutting the diecut image without the pieces mounted on top of another piece of paper can lead to some frustrating puzzle piecing of the diecut image! LOL. This die is from Papertrey Ink.

8. Here is my final diecut using the Bargello technique.

9. I wanted to use the next size down of the diecut to add to the card I wanted to make.

10. Next I decided on it's placement.

11. Next I used a Hero Arts stamp on a scrap.

12. Then I cut out the image.

13. All that's left to do is figure out the final placement of all my pieces! I cut another piece of Cosmo Cricket paper as a background for my Bargello diecut. I inked each piece and I also stamped a sentiment on the front. The sentiment is also from Hero Arts.

14. The final card:

15. A bit of a close up:

**I hope you are able to try this technique. I really enjoyed myself with it. ** You can also check out my card on my etsy shop. I even made a twinchie with the left over scraps.

Thank you for stopping by today!

~Julie

Layouts using only 5 type of Embellishments

I have trouble not adding extra paper layers or embellishments to my layouts, it has become my style and I really like it, but once in a while, changes are good. I challenged myself to try to add only 5 types of none paper embellishments, this is what I made:

My Boyz (I ran out of letters “s” and had to improvise ;)

Brads, Clips, Ribbon, Cotton Twine & Thickers. Using pattern paper as the background instead of cardstock gives more life to a page and the half die cut paper is a great decoration.

This ledger envelope from Making Memories and tags also serves as decoration, all that was left to embellish were the title and the photos.

My Favorite Guy

Brads, Clips, Staples, Ribbon & Lace

Am I the only one who has a husband that refuses to pose for the camera? I gave up and just took random pics of him. My background paper is the biggest embellishment, and it is also my title, the photo booth type photos do not need to be matted on paper because they already have the white frame they came with.

Wrestling Masks

Brads, Staples, Cotton Twine, Chipboard & Thickers

These photos crack me up; it’s my niece and husband posing with there Mexican Wrestling Masks before they left to see the actual match.

Part of my paper decorations are the die cut and label pieces from the same paper collection, I normally end up using less then the third part of those shapes.

The circle punch shapes are distressed, I matted a small spiky circle and a brad.

Now I challenge you to make a layout using only 5 or even less none paper type of embellishments, post them to Julie's Let's Scrap group at Our Scrappy Community.

Did you notice I used the same paper collection "Knave of Hearts by Collage Press" for my three layouts? well, I would like to invite you to Julie's new Group Use Your Scraps, here is a description of the group in her words: Here's your chance to use all your scraps and show off what you've made, no matter what type of project you've made! We'd love to see the magic you can make with scraps!!

And finally I would like mention that all three layouts are made using the fabulous Sketches of online class Sketchbook 3 by KP, I took the previous two and just love that class.

I hope we'll start seeing your creations at our scrappy community :)

Earth Day is getting closer and we will be celebrating it for a complete week with recycled ideas and projects, mark your calendars for April 16-22 .

Sending you the Best week wishes from the Windy City!

=Di

Inspiration Monday!

When I was fishing for inspirational images for this month's Inspiration Monday, I did a google search for Easter images and I found this super cute pic: I do not know it's original web source but I thought it would be a great jumping off point for our projects. Here's how it works: 1. Let this image inspire you (maybe by the design or colors, etc.) 2. Create your project (card, journal page, atc, tag, etc.) 3. Upload pictures of your creation to our Inspiration Group on Ning. 4. Leave some love for any other participants and join us next month for another inspirational image! Hope to see your creation soon! ~Julie

Travel Journal

At a younger age when I traveled my 3 priorities after taking care of the transportation and hotel were a) Tours b) Souvenirs c) Food, you read correctly, souvenirs over food, I could go on with one meal and a couple of snacks a day just to have extra money left to purchase something that would remind me forever of the trip. I’ve moved Food to priority b, not for my health, but because traditional gastronomy is part of getting to know a new place, so now when I return home the extra pounds are not in my suitcase ;) I still bring back souvenirs, but most of them are Ticket Stubs, Brochures, Postcards and any other type of memorabilia that will help me document my trip. I found that adding these to layouts did not look that good and there was no point of hiding them in an envelope or sticking them behind the layout just for reference, also it was very hard for me to document my vacations in 12X12 pages.

As many of you I get loads of inspiration reading blogs, and one of my favorite bloggers is Amy Tan, she once posted about a Travel Journal and I was fascinated with the idea, HERE is an example of a travel journal she made.

I’ve made three already and I’m hooked for life, this one is from my last vacation, I’ll share half of it with you because I do not want to fill up this post with photos ;)

For the body I used a Martha Stewart clear plastic binder, I have a lot of memorabilia from this trip and needed a very resistant cover to hold all of it The first page is my journal cover; I used a postcard of this beautiful city for the title. I still plan on making layouts about my favorite vacation moments, but I have a lot of photos that wont make it to a layout, I added a bunch of those to this journal, that way I wont have many repeated photos on two different albums.

Most of the pattern paper I used is from Studio Calico, I also got my binder of small scraps out to add some border punched layers.

I didn’t want to make the pages too fat so I kept the embellishing simple: ribbon, brads, clips, staples, flairs, stickers and the most important embellishment Journal Tags, because for me the journaling is very important, I want to always remember every detail of this amazing vacation.

We were so lucky that my cousin Nestor knows the city and its history very well; we practically had our very own private tour guide. I was able to add a lot of interesting journaling about the city because I took video of the tours he gave us.

To save space some of the pages open to reveal more photos and journaling.

I still have to accomplish making these journals during the vacation, the advantage of doing that is that the memories are fresh and it is easier to add the journaling, if you don’t have time for that you can do what I do: carry a small notebook to write down things you do not want to forget, keep an envelope or small binder in your suitcase to have the memorabilia you start to collect in one place, if you want to be even more organized you can separate them by day with a paperclip, I also write down the dates or any important information behind ticket stubs, if I get a business card from a restaurant I write behind it what I ate or sometimes I just take a picture of the menu, take pictures of everything that can help you re-live a day like the name of a museum or a tour boat.

Finally let me share THIS amazing project from Sandy Ang I plan on putting all the videos I took on a DVD and add them to this journal in that cool way.

I think this has been the largest post I have ever done, I hope you don't mind my chatty side and I especially hope I was able to inspire you to make a travel journal about your next vacation.

Have a wonderful day!

=Di

It's a bright, sunshiny day!

April is here and that means the April showers are here too! I made the following card last night as the rain started coming down. I was inspired by the blue on the vintage pattern girls and I ran with that as my primary color scheme. I used GCD studios paper and a Martha Stewart doily. I loved how the white doily popped on the card. As a finishing touch, I used a Melissa Frances rub on. (which I just love!) I hope this Monday treats you well! Thank you for stopping by today! ~Julie