A little bit French for A Vintage Journey

Hello everyone and lovely to see you.
I am super excited to be hosting the 3rd challenge over at A Vintage Journey. The theme I chose was "A little bit French. You can read all the details over on the blog there.

For my project I created a little mini book inspired by Tim's new Collection Folios, only as I don't have one yet, I decided to create a kind of mini version myself.

The little book tells the love story (Histoire d'Amour) of the dashing young Francois Du Pré. You can see him here on the cover (ok so I found him among Tim's Found Relatives....).
I made the cover for my little book out of Ranger manila card stock.

 I cut it to 6" by 11 3/4" (I did not want it totally square) and scored at 5 1/4 from both sides leaving me with a 1 1/4 spine.
The inside of the book was constructed following Laura Denison's Stack the Deck method. Here is a link to instructions on how to do that. I made mine out of Kraft Card. This is what it looked like from the front and the back:

I used two 6 x 6" envelopes and some tags and tickets to make the inside. You will need to glue the envelopes shut and then trim one side to the size you want the pages to be. The opening will fit over the hinge bits as you can see from the photos below:

 Envelope trimmed to size

And slid over the hinge bit. Please note, only do this after you have covered your envelopes with your chosen papers and decorations.

Alright, let's look at the pages now and hear the story of how Francois found the beautiful Rose Delieux...

Here you can see Francois, born just outside Paris, the son of a well to do industrialist. He is an avid writer and writes the most wonderful love letters. Hence one of his many inkwell and quill pens on the cover.

One day on a trip to Paris, while visiting friends, he met the beautiful Rose, dressed in all her finery, still young and demure, but oh so lovely, Francois fell in love with her on first site:

Here is one of the many love letters he would subsequently write to her, but alas, for many a month, he never got a reply...

As the months and years passed, Francois started to pine away, until one day he decided he must return to Paris to meet her again, he asked his friend and mentor to come along with him...

On the left a tag, depicting this trip and on the right, his mentor, the stern monsieur La Blanche. This is how they fit into the folio:

Now on this trip, something special happened, you will see it on the back of these tags: (I will only give you a brief outline of a very long story)...They met Rose's younger sister, sweet Geraldine. The moment she saw Francois she remembered him, and with a twinkle in her eye told him to just be brave, go and see her big sister and ask for her hand in marriage. The reason she had not written back was only because she was not sure that his intentions were honourable, but really she had been pining for him terribly too... You see Geraldine below, when she was still very young

Well, Francois, did not need to be told twice, and off he went to see Rose again, this time much more mature but just as lovely as before.

As you can imagine, what happened next was wonderful, - he fell on his knee, proposed and soon the wedding was celebrated. Below is one of the pictures of the wedding, unfortunately a little damaged by time. Rose still looks a little uncertain, but in her heart she was blissfully happy.

For their honeymoon they decided to go to London; not long after Rose fell pregnant and gave birth to a beautiful little girl, they named her Geraldine, after her sister, because she had been instrumental in bringing them together.

Their trip to London, you can see one of the tickets of a theater performance they saw, and of course they also saw the changing of the guards and Big Ben.

Little Geraldine aged 3. (This was a photo transfer using gel medium. Shelly Hilcox has a brilliant tutorial on how to do this, you can see it here: )

The back of the tags and the end page showing some of Francois's illustrious ancestors, all worthy industrialists too.....

Here you can still see the outside covers when the book is open and with that I have come to the end of my story.

Hope you liked it and that you could see more or less how I put it all together. The papers were from the French Industrial and the new Wallflower collections. All photos from the Found Relatives cards,  I used several different stamp sets, but mostly Paris to London and Nature Walk and of course loads of different bits of Ideaology. Almost all product used can be found at Country View Crafts who are the sponsors of our challenge.

Well, thank you so much for dropping in and maybe some of you even stayed with it until the end. Hope you will check out the Vintage  Journey blog and see the amazing projects my team mates have created and of course we all hope you will join in the challenge!

I apologize for this very long and photo rich posts and hope you will have a great weekend and enjoy some inky creative time!!