60 years memory album

At the end of January, my aunty reached the big 60 and as a special present for her, I decided to make her a memory album with some carefully selected pictures from hundreds of photo albums. It was hard to choose which ones to use as I couldn't fit them all in, but I was pleased with the results.

I decided to group it into chronological order and I used quite a lot of the new products from the new Papermania Vintage Notes collection. I bought some of the 12x12 paper and was pleased to find that it had a linen finish to it, giving it that high quality feel.

For the cover I bought some of the adhesive material that Papermania have started doing. It was quite hard to punch through with the bind it all machine and I had to carefully trim some of the excess bits with my craft knife:

The doily was die-cut into vellum with one of the new Xcut dies and I had to spend ages poking all the intricate holes out. I used chipboard letters which I painted with pearlescent pink paint, and some adhesive numbers from the Papermania birthday range. The extra large flowers were layered together and finished with a pink button in the middle.

I won't put all the pages on here just in case there are some pictures that she doesn't like! But some of my favourite pages are these:

I had lots of black and white pictures of when her and my mum were young which worked very well together on a double page spread:

I had some mini banner stamps which I used to date each picture. For an extra special finish I heat embossed them with black powder.

My next favourite is the garden double page spread. I found some film strip embellishments from Crafty Individuals and the colours in the strip matched the colours in the garden perfectly.

Which is then followed by this page. I searched everywhere for some sewing themed paper to match the cross stitch pictures I had, and I found a lovely 12x12 glittered sheet which worked so well. Unfortunately, the pictures themselves took up quite a bit of space so I couldn't use as much of the paper as I would have liked to.

The album was presented to my aunty a few weeks ago and she loved it - which I'm very glad about as it did take quite a long time to do.

Now I've got the buzz for making memory albums I need to find some more pictures from the many photo albums!

Notebook Wall Hangings

I came up with the idea for the notebook wall hangings when I came across a project in a magazine. I also used to own one when I was much younger and I think it's always handy to have a notebook on hand. They are also very decorative (and perhaps a little too nice to use?) but they would make great presents.

The first one I made was this 'To do List':

The main notebook is made out of A6 card blanks and scored and taped together. I then covered the front with patterned paper and wrapped some coordinating paper around the top to hide the joins in the layers.

The backing was made from a chipboard album page and covered with patterned paper with the edges inked. I cut out a lace effect border for the bottom strip and used some adhesive white letters for the words. To emphasise them I outlined each letter with a brown fine liner pen.

The roses are made from embossing powder, heated up with some mica powders thrown in, and poured into a mould.

The next one I made was this flowery plain one:

I wanted to make it as girly as possible and I added some vellum heat embossed butterflies.

The notebook on the next one was made using a lacy die. It was quite time consuming as I had to cut each page individually, and then poke the holes out from the decorative edge as they didn't all come out when I took it out the die cutter:

I really like the Wellington Bear range that Papermania have recently brought out and this image was so cute. The letters on this one are chipboard letters which I them heat embossed in blue.

I made another Wellington Bear hanging also in blue but this time I decided it was easier to make the notebooks using the card blanks

And finally another girly one:

I have lots more ideas and things to put on the notebooks so there will be more shortly. I (might) also try and make some more using the die cutter because even though they are quite fiddly I think they look very effective!

Claire