Card Albums - a photo heavy post!

Hi Everyone,

Saturday is almost over and here I am just getting a chance to sit down at the computer!

How has your day been? Fun, I hope :) It's been another busy sort of day for me - some of it crafting but some of it was spent taking down and packing away the Christmas decorations for another year. I always feel so sad when we reach day twelve and have to pack Christmas away ... the house always looks so dull without the decs!

One thing that I just needed to sort out was the handcrafted Christmas cards we have received, not just this year but for several previous years. We used to simply throw them away, or give them to charity, but that was before I became a cardmaker. Now I really appreciate the amount of work that goes into a handmade card and so just have to keep them.  But that means I have piles of them stashed away in boxes - not very tidily at that - they are works of art and, as such, deserve to be better treated. This year I've put my organiser's hat on and this is what I came up with.

Two card albums, one for Christmas and the other for the more general cards. They look very decorative on my brag shelf and anyone can take them down and browse through them whenever they like. The albums started life as plain, ordinary Academic diaries ... I hoard diaries, notebooks and journals too. If there's a cure for all this hoarding I haven't discovered it yet!!!

I removed the diary pages and any planner pages that had been used ... as both had been under-utilised this was quickly done. Next I raided the snippet box to pretty up the covers. First the Christmas Card Album.

The papers are a mix of Daisy Bucket Designs - the polka dotted paper - and DCWV Holiday Specialty Diecuts Stack. The title a is also made up from a mix of BoBunny alphas - Father Christmas (green) and Serenity (red). The poinsettia petals and leaves were ready cut, from snippets - using the Spellbinders Layered Poinsettia die. I'd gone through the card snippets some time ago and cut a stash of them - really handy to have :)

Here's a few more photos from the completed album.

the inside front cover

back cover 

one of the inside pages

Both albums have a plastic pocket like the one above - handy for holding cards that have a lot of dimension to them.

The second album is pretty much the same as the Christmas album, it's just covered with another mix of papers that includes the absolute last ... sob ... of that polka dot paper from Daisy Bucket designs. The other papers are from Docrafts Papermania - Happy Days and Boutique (the grey leaf design). The title is made up of letters from Docrafts Forever Friends (red) and Jillibean Soup Alphabeans (black) alphas. The embellishment flowers are simply made up of punched shapes and were inspired by one of the prompts in Shimelle's Scrapbook Remix course.

To finish here's a few pics of pages from this album.

inside front cover

back cover

inside back cover

I won't bore you with any more - the inside of both albums are unremarkably similar :)

I'll be submitting this to Pixie's Crafty Snippets tomorrow just as soon as Di opens up the playground again for week #54.

If you have hung on in this far, well done and thank you very much ... you deserve a medal :)

I hope you found it worth while and if you have the same hoarding instincts as I have, perhaps my altered notebooks have given you some inspiration too. Neither album took too long to do, and they do look very decorative on that shelf :))

I now find myself eyeing up my stash of notebooks, etc., thinking of how I can either re-purpose them or simply prettify them with some of the many scraps of leftover paper there is lingering in the snippet box!

Right, there's a half done scrap layout on my desk awaiting my attention so I'm off to finish it and perhaps even start another ... I must be the slowest scrapper on record!

I hope you all having a great weekend, whether crafting or not.

Take care and happy crafting,