A Little Bit of Inspiration

Hello and welcome to another new month and another new project for the Mini Album Makers Challenge.  We would love you to share your albums or handmade books with us and the Design Team have put together some amazing inspiration for you to get started! So do hop on over to our challenge blog post where I am sure you will not be disappointed.

I have made a small concertina style book this month which houses some of my tea stained textiles and embellishmets. It also uses some of fellow team mate Alison Bomber's sentiments from her her selection of music and silence stamp set (PaperArtsy EAB03) which I love.

This is going to be a long post! So grab a cuppa and I'll show you some pictures first of the mini book and then the instructions for making it. 

I love small inspirational mini books which you can just pick up at any time and browse through to either pick up some arty inspiration or more importantly some life inspiriation in the form of quotes.

This is quite a basic mini book and I just made it up as I went along in terms of size and the number of pages, making the cover once I had finished my pages so I knew what size to make it.

TUTORIAL

I started with the pages and took an A4 sheet of cardstock (not sure world wide what this would translate to but on it's long side it measures 11 5/8" long). I cut a strip which measured 2 3/4" and then I scored at 3", 6" and 9". This gave me 3 x 3" pages and a smaller page at the end.

I cut two strips in total and these were joined so that the small strip was inside the join. 

I love small pages like this but don't like stamping or collaging directly onto the page. So ....... I always make some smaller pages which I then decorate and stick down on to the base. Not really cheating ...... just adds more layers!

These are my six pages. I wanted to decorate them with bits and pieces from my recent tea bath. No not me but I made a whopper of a pot of tea and poured it quite strongly into a bowl and put in bits of lace, ribbon, paper and wooden embellishments.  I let it soak for a few hours and then dried it off. I now have some wonderful bits and pieces to decorate with and which are all beautifully coloured in the same soft brown tones.  I just LoVE brown tones!

Once I had cut the cream cardstock to size I used a single stencil to decorate it here and there with Vintage Photo Distress Ink and added some background text - again here and there as I had no idea where the embelllishments were going to go.  I particularly wanted to use Alison's wonderful music and silence sentiments and so added these where I had space.

Once I had these all stuck down onto the cardstock I could measure for the cover. The critical measurement is the spine, but I managed to keep within a 1/2" so that made things easier. But if you try this and add thicker embellishments you might need to increase the size of the spine.

The cover was cut from a piece of cardstock measuring 9 1/2" x 2 3/4" which I then scored at 3", 3 1/2", 6 1/2" and 7" in order to create two spines.

I wasn't quite sure whether the cardstock would take all the crackle product I proposed, but I was very surprised that it did! The cover got a coat of brown chalk paint and then a "sleistering" (Shetland word- no other equivalent!) of DecoArt Crackle paint which I adhered with a palette knife.

This is the reverse side which got a bit messy! I re-painted the right hand side piece and spine as this was going to show once the papers were stuck in. X marks the spot where you need to stick your prepared pages. You will see that I have added a magnet here for the closure. Sadly it got stuck behind the lovely page with the photograph which was just too thick for it to really close well so I had to resort to some ribbon. 

Hopefully you can see from this picture how the two side pages stick on to the cover with the rest "floating" free within the spine.

I then started looking for embellishments for the cover. A mixture of some of the tea stained pieces (lace and wood), a handmade flower (tutorial on my blog HERE if you would like to know more), a bamboo button, some muslin and some stained old book paper. A tiny little bit of stamping on some old book paper was lying in my desk box so I grabbed that as well.

I bought some MDF  bookplates recently and they look really good painted with a pot of Vintage paint which has "gone off".  It sort of covers here and there and gives a wonderful rusty look! The piece from the middle of the bookplate was too wide for the spine so I trimmed it a bit and added a word from one of Alison's stamps stamped onto old book paper.

The finished book!

It really is quite a cute little mini book and I plan to make more with other quotes. I imagine a little box or basket housing some of these little mini's on my kitchen dresser for when I need them.

Thank you so much for joining me and I hope this may have inspired you to join our challenge this month.

Jennie x