Techniques Journal for the Mini Album Makers challenge blog (a project in progress)

Hello lovely visitors and happy February!! Today sees the start of a new challenge over on the Mini Album Makers challenge blog, and here is my book. The blogosphere no doubt will soon be filled with Valentines themed projects, and in fact I will be posting one later today, - but here is something very different, a techniques journal.

This is obviously the cover and in a moment I will show you more about how I put it together. But the main part of my project are the inside pages, consisting of accordion pages with special inserts to keep notes.  I saw something similar on pinterest, thought it a great idea and so created my own version. The original I saw was made from one large sheet of watercolour paper, which I don't have, so I made mine from individual double pages which I made into an accordion by taping them together with washi tape.

So far so good, now for the inserts, - I cut separate double pages from squared paper plus drawing paper (to protect the notes from the other pages, which might otherwise rub off on them.

I then used the simlest of bookbinding techniques, the 3 hole one, to insert them into the accordion.
And below you can see how they were sewn into the main accordion, I put one little insert in every  valley, but oly on one side, the other side was left as a normal accordion.

With the main structure of the album in place, it was time to start working on the cover. I cut 3 pieces of thick mat board, slightly larger than the inside pages, for the front, back and a separate piece for the spine, covered them in some of my favourite scrapbook papers and then glued them together as you can see below

I did this by scoring the spine about a quarter inch from each side, glued the one side to the front and the other to the back and that was it, so simple. Here is the inside:

I put washi tape around the edges and then covered the spine and back page with black paper. The front inside does not need to be covered as the first side of the accordion is glued to that, thus attacching the inside to the cover. In order that the accordion can fold out, do not adhere it to the pack page, otherwise your accordion would not fold out anymore!!
To decorate the front, I first added some stenciling with transparent texture paste, highlighted the raised bits with some gilding paste when dry and then added some further embellishments:

First  I added some strips of bookpaper, a Tim Holtz metal plate with the word imagine inserted and a pen nib. Then I melted some Ancient Silver embossing powder round about and finally  added some flowers.

On the bottom half I just added some shadows to make the ink bottle that was on the paper (Blue Fern Collection) pop a little more.

Now finally to the inside pages. I have done 5 pages so far. They are all similar but subtly different and I will show you  photos of my notes in the inserts, so you can see te steps I used at the end.

page 1

page 2

page 3

page 4

page 5

And here is a picture of the notes describing how I put them together:

I am sorry, they are not easy to read, but if by any chance you want to know more, just contact me.

There are many more pages to be done, but below I show you a few pictures still of how I finished some of the pages so far:

I used a mix of collage elements, fussy cut stamps and die cuts.

Here is the next double page next to the first insert.

Creating an accordion with inserts like this, gives you tons of space, so far I have only done about a quarter of all the pages.

I attached a lable to the back of the spine still (the die is from the Eileen Hull Book Box die) and that was pretty much it.

Here you can see the accordion inside the cover, ready to fill with furher techniques.

Now, before I sign off, I just want to mention a super giveaway we have going on to celebrate the launch of our new Facebook and Instagram pages:

To read all the details of the giveaway, just click here

Well thanks for saying with me for this very long post and Happy February!

Please hop over to the Mini Album Makers Challenge blog to see the amazing albums my teamies have created and do join us by showing us your own books and albums!

Thanks for your visit like always,

xxxxx