Stamps & Stretchy Pants

When cleaning and reorganizing my craft room lately, I came across a mini album I had made a few years back and was inspired to recreate it with some new supplies. I used the Copper Dotted Treat Bags as the base. I love using a bag or envelope as a mini album base because it comes with built in storage for pull outs so to speak. I decided to use the Ornate Gardens Specialty DSP and colour palette to embellish my album. Of course you can use any DSP and coordinating colors.

To make this album you will need 5 Copper Dotted Treat Bags. This will allow you to have 8 pictures in your album as the cover bag does not hold any photos.

The spine to wrap around your album is a 4 3/4 x 4 piece of card stock scored @ 2 on the short side. I then ran each edge through the Ornate Layers die to give it a bit of detail. You can use a punch or any die to add a decorative edge. I stacked all of the bags together and used Tombow adhesive to glue the spine to the front and back bags. I then secured each inside bag with Tombow. The ribbon died around the spine is purely decorative, it does not hold anything together. It is the new Ornate Garden ribbon from the Ornate Garden Suite. It comes in a two pack with Old Olive and Terracotta Tile.

The outside photo mats are 4 1/4 x 4 1/4 so you can add a 4 x 4 photo to them. I always try and keep my measurements simple for my stampers. I then embellished each page with pieces of DSP and some floral images and sentiments that spoke to the pictures. The Gilded Gems are awesome and I couldn’t resist adding a few into the album. Overall, the album is very flat, I did not want a lot of bulk.

The pullout pages are 4 1/4 x 5 1/2 and I trimmed the photos to fit. I added tabs using the Circle Tab punch in Whisper White so they blended into the album. And I kept all of the embellishments flat (no dimensional, a real challenge for me!) so they could slide in and out of the album easily.

I chose a sentiment for the front that was neutral for whatever photos I wanted to add to the inside. It is from the Capture the Good stamp set in the Idea Book & Catalogue. I layered it with some circle punches and the Label Me Lovely Punch (from the Occasions Catty).

This album features photos from our Nelson Family camping trip each summer to Greenwater Lake, Saskatchewan

This image shows the pullout pages that are tucked inside the Copper Dotted treat bags

I used a mini stapler to secure the tab punches to the base so there was no risk of them tearing free

Welcome to the Joy of Sets Blog Hop for April! Thank you so much for hopping on over to see what we are all up to this month—the theme is BIRTHDAY! Now I could have made a birthday card, but instead I decided to create a scrapbook page of my most recent birthday in January. I had a fun girls night in playing games, eating and drinking Prosecco!

The color pallet for this page was inspired by my birthday cake, however I knew that I also needed to keep it neutral to coordinate with what we are all wearing. And YES, I design my pages around my photos. I typically do not create a page without a photo and I use the subject matter and colors to dictate my color pallet choices. stamps and embellishments.

On this page I have used some current popular product, the Poppy Moments Dies, along with a stamp set from the Annual Idea Book & Catalogue—Seaside Notions. I used some up and coming new products too—the DSP strip right below the bottom photo is the new Ornate Gardens Specialty Designer Paper and I added in some Gilded Gems from this product suite as well.

One fun tip for when using the Poppy Moments Dies is to keep them tone on tone. I ran the base of the flowers through the Subtles Embossing Folder (found in the Idea Book & Catalogue) and it gives it just the right amount of texture.

The colors I used on this page are Crumb Cake, Petal Pink, Grapefruit Grove and Terracotta Tile with gold accents.

This page didn’t not take long to put together and can easily be recreated using different DSP and even different flower dies! I hope it inspires you!