Mini mini Album

Below is a mini album I created using five #10 envelopes.  Love the way it came out.  It is only about 4"x 4 1/4, but has lots of real estate for pictures. 

The paper I used was a Prima 6"x6" stack.  It was actually some leftover paper from a smaller mini I had done.  I was trying to use it all up and I did.  Only thing left is some really small scraps and a couple of tags from the paper and I will probably add that just to get rid of it and to not have to throw it away.  I kept the embellishments to a minimun so that I could focus on the paper.  The roses are both from Prima, as is the pearl bling.  The frame is something I have had forever and have no idea where it came from, maybe the dollar store,   the black on the edge is some  ribbon roses that you get by the yard at Hobby Lobby.  The hard plastic roses came with the pearls.

Haven't done anything with the inside cover, but feel I need to do something, that is probably where some of the left over tags will go.  The right side is a mat and a half.  I used two different Martha Stewart punches to dress up the edges of the mats.

This is still page one, The tab thing in middle of the page actually lifts up and the tags come out.  The flap just fits inside a slot at the bottom of the page.  Love how the band looks like a cigar band.  I had to do a lot of piecing together, since I was using left over paper.

Pages 2 & 3.  Kept them pretty simple, both pages have double mat for a photo.  And all pages have a pull out mat. You may not be able to tell from the picture, but page 2 is actually larger than page 3.  On the larger pages I used a black photo mat, and on the smaller pages I used the peach photo mat with a different edged puch. 

Pages 4&5.  Pretty simply, a little of piecing to be able to cover the pages.  The flap is magnetized and hides a photo mat.  The brackets are fussy cut from the paper.  I have had those round paper clips for a long time and decided I need to start using what I already have.

Page 6&7.  There is a band across the photo mat, which allows a picture to slip behind it.  There is also another photo mat behind the peach mat.  Page 6 is the photo mat and a half..

This is the page 7 photo mat and a half folded out.  There is one of those small Paper Studio paper bags there, mostly hidden by the matting, but it also has a photo mat inside.  I like how the angled pocket came out on page 6.  Added a couple of fussy cuts and glossed them up.

Pages 8 & 9.  Page 8 is accordian folded.  Page 9 is large pocket to hold another photo mat, along with fussy cut butterfly with only its body attached to paper.

Not a great picture of the accordian fold, but it will basically hold 9 pictures.

Page 10&11.  Kept it simple, but the left side has a kind of gate fold feature.

A picture of the gatefold opened up.

Pge 12 & 13.  Started running out of paper, so used some black paper and embossed it.  Attached corners will allow for a large matted picture to be placed on these two pages.

Page 13, the mat and a half.  Simple, but love how it came out.  Just glued the top and bottom of a piece of scrap and placed it over some of the embossed paper and stuck a couple of tags behind it.

Page 14 & 15.  Pocket on page 14 and a photo mat on page 15.

Page 16&17.  Kept it simple.  Used some of the leftover pearls to go around the mat on p17.  A little fussy cut on page 16.

Page 18.  A waterfall.

The waterfall is magnetized.  Ended up using two sets of magnet, one near the top and one near the bottom, so it would lay flat. 

As I mentioned earlier, there is a lot of real estate in this mini.  Now I need to print some pictures for it.

Graphic 45

Oh My Goodness, I am so wanting the new Graphic 45  Mother Goose Collection.  When is CHA and when will that paper be released. 

Home!

I am finally home for a couple of weeks.  As you know, I spent a weekend in North Carolina visiting with my Grandmother, my brother and new sister-in-law, with my sister and other family members..  That was a whirlwind trip, I drove there on Thursday and returned home on Monday.  Then on Wednesday, June 26, 2013, I took some of my youth to South Carolina for the SEJ BMCR Youth Harambee 2013 at Claflin University.  What an amazing trip.  We were all revived.  I wish I could get more of our youth to attend this annual event.  I, and the other youth that attended, are looking forward to Harambee 2014.  My sons are also interested in being a part of their Youth Leadership Team, God is so Awesome.  We returned home on Sunday evening and of course I returned back to work on Monday. 

Soooooo....It is back to the grind again today.  Hope to have some crafting time this week.   Realizing first that the Fourth of July is on Thursday, and my sons will turn 17 on Friday.  WOW, where have the years gone.  It seems like yesterday when we were bringing them home from the hospital. 

More to come.   

A New Epiphany!

I was in Hobby Lobby yesterday and had an epiphany.   It is probably about time that I had it.  I was looking at some new magazines and noticed the magazine about hobby spaces.  I realized that my crafting space does not have to stay perfectly clean.  I bet you are saying, "WOW, you are  just realizing that?"  I spend a lot of time organizing, like a lot of crafters do.  The most important thing about your crafting space is that it works for you.  I craft alone when I am at home.  I find myself organizing a lot, so I can easily find things.  The secret to this is label label label.  If it is labeled, then it is easier to find. 

Now that I have had this epiphany, I can get busy crafting.  I do know that I HAVE to clear my desktop after each project, because I am a messy crafter.  I will be putting my scrapbooking on the back burner for a little bit, to allow for some sewing time.  The nice thing is since  my scrapbooking has taken over my craft room, I now sew in the guest room.  OK, what used to be the guest room.  It no longer has a bed in it.  I will be cleaning it out this weekend, because my husband tends to just throw stuff in it when he doesn't know where it belongs.  I hope to get a couple of expedits from IKEA next month to go in there...yeah.

Well enough about my epiphany.  Have a great day.  Happy Crafting.

Birdhouses

My new thing is birdhouses.  I am loving Laura Denison's birdhouses.  I am also doing some experimenting of my own and making some 3-d projects.  More info coming soon.  Here are some of  my works in progress.

This is the first completed birdhouse.  The sides of the roof lift up to reveal the mini album inside.

This is the mini that goes inside.  The mini is complete.  For some reason, I could not get all the pictures to rotate correctly.  I will try again another day.

I love the idea of using the plastic sheeting from the bling to create a pocket. 

Trying to use my edge punches more.  Cute tags and the mini birdcage is a prima embellishment.

Fussy cut the leaf from the paper and used a simple tag with the We R Memory Keepers corner punch.

Had some spare paper and fussy cut it and made some extra tags.  I like how the tag opper came out.

Loved the mini bags from Hobby Lobby.  Paper Studio has definitely stepped up their game.

Embossed these tags with Tim Holtz embossing folder.

Can you believe that I actually stamped.  Yeah for me.  It is a Tim Holtz stamp.

Anothe of those mini envelopes with some fussy cuttings. Small tag on front and another tag in envelope.

Simple page, fussy cut flower to hold tag.

Love the simplicity of the punch on the page.

A little fancier page.  Love the zipper look.  Tag is embossed.

 

This is a peek at the gazebo birdhouse.  Hopefully, I can get back to my room to get it finished.  The mini is almost done, but I have a lot of decorating to do to the gazebo itself.

 

This is the third one.  I like the simplicity of it.  The whole top comes off to reveal a mini, I think.  It is meant to have individual tags/pages, but I think I am going to put a regular mini in it.

 

Whirlwind Trip

I took a long weekend to go see my Grandmother.  It was her church's Friends and Family Day.  I took the time to go also, because my brother and his new wife were going to be in attendance.  It was a great weekend.  Tiring, but great.  My friend from church Rebecca went with me.  I am so appreciative of her riding with me, because my kids had basketball games, they did not want to miss.

This is my 96 year old Grandmother.  Yes, she has a cane, but she does not use it.  She takes it so my aunt doesn't fuss.  She swings the cane. LOL.  She still cooks all her own meals and does her own laundry.  She is an amazing woman.  She had more than 200 grandchildren, great grandchildren, great great grandchildren, and great, great great grandchildren.   There are at least 5 generations of us walking around because of this amazing woman.   

This is my brother, Oscar.  It has been several years since we have been able to get together.  I am so happy that we both made the trip to Mesic, NC this past weekend.  He is older and I do like to rub it in.  He is only 11 months older, but every little bit helps.  LOL

This is my new sister-in-law, Lorraine.  Love her.  My brother and she dated over 30 years ago, and found each other again and are now married.  Young love.  Love the newlyweds.

This is my NC family.  My sister, her husband, my brother and his wife, my nieces and great nieces.  It was really nice seeing them all.   I must confess, normally when I go to NC, I spend all my time with my grandmother and don't take time to see my other kinfolk.  I must do better.  I really enjoyed them all.  Wish I had more time to spend with them.

For some reason, I really love this picture.  Maybe because Tiere is in it.  That is my great nephew on the end.  He has been really good at keeping in touch with me.   Thanks Nephew.  Love you.

 

Mini Mini

This is a little mini mini I did last night.  I went to a High School in the County for a sort of college fair last night.  I learned so much that I did not know, that I should have known.  When we got home I had some pent up energy/frustrations so I sat and made this mini mini.  It is only 2"x3".  I think it came out cute.  I think I will put some pictures of my family in it.

I think the paper is by Prima, it was from a 6"x6" stack.  I like how it came out. I may add a little more embellishments, but I like the simplicity of this mini, so I may not do much more to it.  This would be a cute key chain mini, and you can make it as small as you would like.  All the base pages are made from chipboard so it is pretty sturdy.  The chain is thread through an eyelet so the chipboard doen't tear.  I may tie some shear ribbon on the chain.

I forgot to put the magnet in, so I just made a loop to thread the closure through.  It works. The strap is made of chipboard that is matted with the paper line.

I kept the book simple as you see in the next photos.

 



There are six chipboard pages and the hinge system is similar to the way most put a paperbag album together.  Thanks for looking.

More of My Scrap Room

I took a few more pictures of my scrap room.

This is the original bookshelf I made to house paper.  I like vertical storage.  My paper tends to not get dog eared.  I do have some horizontal storage as you can see from the left side of this picture.  That is one of the black racks that HL sells.  I just built a box around it so it would be sturdier and would stand up to being moved.  The papers in this bookshelf are stored a couple of ways.  Mostly by theme, but there are a few page collections, and some miscellaneous papers.  I am going to re-label, once paper has been resorted.

This is more vertical paper which goes about 3/4 of the way across the counter.  Under the counter to the left are some wheeled units I made which house either ribbon, paper or punches.  Under the counter to the right is a cabinet I built that houses stickers stored in plastic cases by theme.  Oops forgot to take a picture. The papers in the picture are either themed papers, or specialty papers.

These drawers are across from the vertical paper shown in previous picture.  They house page kits and odds and ends, for example zutter boards, zutter rings, binding supplies.

Excuse the mess under these clip it up type storage units.  This is where most of my embellishments are stored.  I have tried many ways of storing small embellishments, but this tends to keep it in sight and easily available.  I have 5 of them.  One has nothing but Tim Holtz finding/idea-ology, the others are mixed, but in a way that makes sense to me.  The two units on the ends are actually Clip It Up double decker units. .

This is what I see when I am standing at my table.  The clip it ups are behind these white boxes.  The big plastic container on the left houses liquid or spray adhesives.  The 12 x 12 box (under the peppermints) houses my stickles.  The drawers hold odds and ends and need to be cleaned out and organized.  Saving that for another organizing fit.

This is what I see from my work station.  I placed two 6 foot table, long side to long side, and placed the cubes on the back table.  The front table is my work surface.

Here are my Cricut Expression, Cricut Imagine, and Cricut Expression 2.  The shelf above the E2 will house one of my wide format printers.  Probably the one that is wireless, even though I don't have WIFI at home. This stand is located to the right of my table.  I wanted my machines so I can easily cut using either my gypsy or cartridges. 

Forgot I had taken this picture.  This stand is another of those stands I have had forever.  There are actually three columns of these drawers.  The ones in the middle house page ideas I have cut out or printed, the left multi color ones are adhesive refills, most of which I donate to the church when we scrapbook there.  The unit on the right, which you can't see houses odds and ends.  As you can sense, I really need to use up all those odds and ends.

This is the basic gist of my room.  Of course you haven't seen it all, but from what I have shown, you can tell I have a lot of scrapbooking supplies.  I am going to spend some time doing some serious scrapbooking in 2013.  My children will be graduating in 2014 and by then, I would like to have made a good dent in the pictures I have taken of them over the years.  I also would like to get some of my pictures scrapped.  I hope to continue sharing my projects with those that visit my blog. 

Have a Blessed Day.