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!

Journal of my Life

I was thinking of another book to make and decided to look for some ideas on the Sweet Shoppe Designs website. I had previously downloaded a digital scrapbooking kit from here so I thought I would have another look to see what's new when I came across the Journal of my Life scrapbook kit.

I immediately fell in love with the colours used and downloaded it to use. The kit comprises of a number of papers, elements and alphabets and because it's a downloadable pack you can print off and re-size the pieces you want to use.

I chose an 8x8 book because it leaves enough space to add both photos and embellishments. I bound it using the Zutter Bind it All machine because it makes a very sturdy book and looks professional.

The Love and Life were cut out from the kit and glittered using stickles glitter glue. I stuck a piece of white lace along the bottom with double sided tape and then die cut a heart from chipboard. Then, using the frantage embossing powder in shabby pink and some shaved ice, I embossed the heart and stuck it over the lace.

The circular butterfly element was embossed onto black card using WOW violet pearl powder and mounted onto a scalloped circle coloured with distress ink. The yellow card candy was made using some kraft card candy and embossed with yellow WOW powder.

The inside of the book has individually decorated pages that have enough room to put pictures on them and to add your own embellishments.

 This is the first page and I have made a frame out of ribbon. I cut 4 strips of ribbon to the same length and trimmed the ends diagonally. I then put double sided tape onto each strip and layered them over each other, ready for a picture to be added.

The turquoise paper on the right is my favourite and I felt that I didn't want to add too much to these pages. A journalling element was added to the left hand page to record details of the pictures added.

This one is another of my favourite papers - the journal page. I wasn't sure what I could add to this page so just a butterfly with some glitter added. On the right hand page I die cut another chipboard heart but this time I embossed with blue lagoon WOW powder, punched a hole in it and threaded through some twine.

The paper on the left hand side of the above is a replicate of some newspaper, which I love. I really couldn't  find an element that would go with this paper so I left it blank and complimented it with some purple wood effect paper opposite, finished with a tag.

And the last page I'm going to show you is this one. The left hand page features a tag and a felt circle replicated element that was part of the kit. I have glittered the flower detailing and will put a small silver gem in the middle of it.

On the right hand side I have added another journalling tag as well as some butterflies that were heat embossed with WOW powder in pomegranate.

As you can see, there is still plenty of room to add your own personal touch to this book and I have created the pages so that they all co-ordinate and there is lots of colour.

Part of me doesn't want to sell this book but the good thing about it is that if I do sell it, I can always make another one!