But last year I saw this chipboard mini album made by Twiddleybitz and couldn't resist it. Really, how cute are those shaped pages and ornate details!
Being my first off the page project, I was a little nervous about where to start. I grabbed a 6 x 6" paper pad from the beautiful My Minds Eye - Follow Your Heart - Be Happy collection, some pretty lace and some Prima flowers and set to work.
You will often hear card makers mention how great 6 x 6" pads are for card making due to the smaller print on the patterned papers. I think this is also true for mini albums, because you're working with a smaller workspace than the usual 12 x 12" layout.
Having said that though, I found some of the larger pages in the album were slightly wider than 6 inches. Luckily the My Minds Eye paper pads have two pages of each design, so I simply used both pages of the one patterned paper, being careful to align the pattern on each edge. If you look closely on my front page above, you will see the join above the banner.
Chipboard gives you so many options in terms of altering. While the patterned paper covers most of the album pages, the edges of each chipboard page and the ornate details are begging to be altered. On this album I used an off-white acrylic paint for most of those pieces, but a dark brown for the very front 'window', which I then distressed by sanding away some of the brown paint once dry, to give a shabby effect.
I inked and stitched around the edges of each page, and in some places you will see some additional stamping.
I made this album of my niece and nephew "Mud Puddle Jumping", in some puddles left by the previous night's rain. You can't beat the joy kids get from simple pleasures huh?
You can see the beautiful detail in one of the ornate edges here.
The hexagon patterned paper was a little too bright for this page, so I simply gave it a light whitewash effect with some of my acrylic paint. I used this same technique for the front page, over the music note paper.
The olive greens and sky blues in this collection are perfect for a boy page.
And there you have it, my first off the page project finished. It wasn't so daunting after all!
Shortly after I finished this project, I was asked if I would make a series of three mini albums, to be given as gifts of appreciation to members of this wonderful organisation that provides much needed assistance to individuals and families across the Sunshine Coast, and other communities around Australia.
As these projects were gifts of appreciation to people I didn't know, it was impossible to include photographs in them. In place of photos, I was provided with one inspirational poem to use, and then scoured Pinterest and the internet for other inspirational quotes. Pinterest is an amazing source of information. I have pinned so many wonderful quotes here, and it's great to have them on hand - you never know when you'll need a great quote!
Naturally because I loved working with this Twiddleybitz album so much the first time, I was excited to be given three more of these gorgeous albums to play with.
For this album, I had a French garden in mind. I pulled papers from Kaisercraft's Lake House collection, which has a lot of floral elements to it, and really does have an air of a grand country garden.
Lots of opportunities for fussy cutting those gorgeous blooms.
This collection included a 3 x 4 journalling paper which provided a lovely quote for the album.
On some of the pages I printed the quotes on my printer directly onto cardstock, and then added them to a tag, which could then be pulled out of a little hand made envelope.
A close up of one of the envelopes.
So that's two slightly differing styles of decorating the same chipboard mini album. I can't wait to show you the final two styles I came up with!
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