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

I was going through some old photos the other day, you know because we have THE TIME, and I came across this one of me, Reese and Summer. Reese would have been around 4 and Summer under 1. I used her cute hat (I loved hats with big flowers on them because she was bald!) and tutu as the color palette for this scrapbook page. I would also say that Petal Pink might be my favourite color at the moment. I am so happy Stampin’ Up! added it to their color lineup when they did the Color Refresh!

I did a simple color wash with my Aqua Painter in the background with Petal Pink and then I layered some Calypso Coral on top and did a bit of flicking with the Aqua Painter. And then I just started digging out flower stamp sets and dies from my collection. I used the Forever Blossoms stamp set and Cherry Blossoms dies, To a Wild Rose stamp set (I used Calypso coral as the outline, the solid fill in stamp is in Petal Pink and third detailed layer is in Grapefruit Grove) and Wild Rose dies, Magnolia Memories Dies, and the Frosted Bouquet dies. The Your Amazing sentiment is from the new Ornate Thanks stamp set coming out in the new Idea Book & Catalogue. The grey accent is Grey Granite as it had the same undertone to it and worked well with this color palette.