Aug
30

Mini album birthday present

Posted by DeAnna

In my last post I showed you the card I made for my mother’s birthday. Today I want to show you the present I made for her. At one of the Photo Express crops I was given a Cosmo Cricket blackboard mini album. It was so cute, but I wasn’t sure I would ever use it. Since I’ve been so creative recently, the idea came to me that I would use it to make a mini album for my mom to carry around and show off to friends and co-workers, etc. I knew I wanted to use red, since that’s my mom’s favorite color, but I don’t have a lot of red patterned paper that I could use, so I went to Photo Express and searched and searched and searched. I couldn’t find anything. Until I went into the Christmas aisle! Ah ha! Lots of red there! ;D I saw the Wassail Basic Grey 6×6 pad (which I believe is retired, unfortunately) and when I looked through it I noticed there were several sheets that didn’t seem to have as much of a Christmas theme to them. They didn’t have presents or holly or snowflakes or anything like that, and they were full of a beautiful rich deep red. This is what I came up with when I sat down to work on the album:

The pages that have the large Tim Holtz die cut (this one) will have photos of my kids on them. I may cut them into circles using my punches to keep the theme going with the coordinating pages.

On the cover, I decided to try a new technique for me using a mask to make my title. I started with the lightest solid color paper which I attached to the front of the album. Then I took some Chatterbox alpha stickers and set them in the position I wanted the title. Next I used Ranger Distress Ink in Fired Brick and a bit of Antique Linen (to darken the fired brick a bit), and sponged it over top of the letters, and around the front of the album. I think I might have used some Peeled Paint a bit too around the edges. I also used some ColorBox chalk ink in Burnt Sienna. Then I peeled off the letters gently (they came off fairly easily actually, since I had taken some of the stickiness off with my fingers before placing them) and I was left with the lighter colored paper beneath. I added some diamond stickles to the letters to make them stand out a bit more. I hand colored the ribbon with my Copic markers to match the patterned papers, made a handmade rose and added some Hero Arts bling (gorgeous colors!) to finish it off.

For the inside pages I kept it fairly simple, using the die cut, and circles on opposite pages. To finish those off I used my white gel pen to add some highlighting. I’ve had that gel pen for over a year, and this is the first time I’ve used it!! Once I have the photos in hand and put them into the album I’ll look at adding a few other embellishments to finish off each page. I was having trouble accessing our backup system for our photos and I had to figure a work around to get to them, so I didn’t get that finished by mom’s birthday last Thursday. I’ll show the finished pages when I’m finished with them – hopefully soon!

On Thursday I’ll show you another layout I finished last week while Rob was out of town. I did three layouts in one week! Woohoo!

DeAnna

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