One stamp and hidden bookrings, a mini for the MAM challenge

Hello friends and welcome to another post for MAM or the Mini Album Makers challenge blog.
It's the first of the month, so that means a new challenge is starting and like always we would love you to share your albums or handmade books of any kind. Our sponsor is no other than Stencilgirl with a fab prize to win, so do come and check it all out!

The idea for this album came when I noticed that the old Sizzix Vintage Cabinet Card Bigz die, was just a little larger than the new stacked thinlets dies of the same shape. So that meant I could cut the covers from mount board using the Bigz die and then the inner pages using the largest of the stacked thinlets.

The next idea I had was to just use one stamp (I chose the Glorious Bouquet by Tim Holtz). It is very large, so I could use different corners and colour in different ways. I also decided to use book rings to make it possible to add pages to the album over time if I want to.

Here you can see the front and the back. As I don't particularly like the look of large bookrings sticking out of the spine, I was delighted to find a video showing how you can construct a book where the bookrings are hidden. I adapted the way I made mine, but if you are interested, HERE is a link to the original video I saw. And below a short desciption of what I did:

Line up your cover with the spine in the middle as shown. As you can see I had cut holes in my covers already before deciding on the different binding, but as they are going to be covered with design papers anyway, that did not matter.

I used small 20 mm book rings, make sure your holes are just over half the distance apart (so in my case 10 mm), for the rings to fit through easily.

Here you can see the rings in place just to show you, before I attached the covers with the help of double stick tape and design tape as shown in the video.

the outside once covered with paper and tape

the inside

I used papers from the Memoranda paper stash by Tim and cut the papers using the same Bigz die obviously.

Now to the inside pages, they don't need much description, I stamped different corners of the stamp in different coloured Archival Inks etc and then coloured the flowers mostly with my Prisma coloured pencils and then used distress oxides and normal distress inks, plus some background stamps and stencils for the backgrounds. I'll let the photos tell the story...

And here a double page in situ, - there is a bit of a seasonal theme going on here, which was not necessarily planned, but the stamp is so versatile and can be used in so many different ways. I have more pages pre stamped, but I thought this was plenty to show you for this time.

Now for the spine: To cover the rings, I simply added some additional design tape and lace over the rings on the outside, made a couple of little charms to add and that was pretty much it.

Well, that's it for today, - hope you will have a wonderful month of June with lots of sunshine in it anad do head over to our challenge blog to see the amazing books my teamies have created and get all the details of our challenge!