Category Archives: Scrapbooking

Photo Explosion Box: Golden Wedding Anniversary

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An explosion box is a really great gift to surprise someone with. You can make it interactive with tags & pockets, using design paper to decorate. There are several examples of these on this blog, and there’s a tutorial in my Etsy shop.

Another way to decorate is to use pictures only. This way it will become a treasure trove of someone’s dearest memories, always easy to keep nearby and peruse them. This kind I’ve dubbed a 100% Photo Explosion Box. And this week I’m sharing one of these, which I created for some people’s golden wedding anniversary.

So enjoy the video & pictures! Please like this post – and of course subscribe if you’d like to receive weekly updates of my work. 🙂

 

 

Man About Town – a New ‘Sturdio’ Album

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A short while ago I designed a new kind of folio album, with accordion style page sets and very sturdy cover parts – hence the new name I coined: a sturdio album 🙂

At the time I was in the Zone designing & creating, so I wasn’t able to write a tutorial. But I promised you I would, and now I have! So here is the second iteration of my sturdio album design, created with Graphic 45’s A Proper Gentleman collection. It’s a little bit larger, but it has the same page design as the original. You can find the tutorial in my Etsy shop.

This one was especially created for my dearest friend Christa, who wanted to have a very special album to keep her favorite pictures of her beloved husband.

So, without further ado, here’s Man About Town, a sturdio album.

 

 

Really Mini File Folio! (Kaisercraft Exchange)

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Not too long ago I participated in Kaisercraft’s brand new international snail mail project called Kaisercraft Exchange, which I really enjoyed. You send out anything you created with Kaisercraft products to someone around the world you don’t know, and likewise you receive something – from someone else entirely. Kaisercraft functions as the trustworthy middleman to swap all of the addresses.

It was so, so much fun to participate the first time! So when they announced their second run of this worldwide surprise swap, I was game!

This time I used the Lush design papers, a Kaisercraft paper collection from 2010, of which I had also miraculously still been able to find the rubons. I designed something completely new (well, to me at least): a Mini File Folder, or Mini Collection Folio if you will. I was absolutely engrossed in designing and creating this project, it really scratched all of the right itches for me, especially after finishing a larger project (coming up soon…) 🙂

So without much further ado, here’s the video. Enjoy, let me know what you think, and do participate in Kaisercraft Exchange next time! Who knows, maybe I’ll be sending you something! 🙂

 

 

 

Some Photo Embellishment Tips

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A short while ago I designed what I called the Easiest Mini Albums Ever Made. Today I’m showing you two more iterations of this kind of wire-bound album, filled with pictures, to demonstrate how you can easily embellish your pictures with some punches, dies and glitter glue.

This way it’s even more fun to peruse your little mini albums again and again, and though it might take you some time, it’s really very easy to do 🙂

 

Stamping a sentiment (stamp by Kaisercraft) on top of the picture! Use ink for non-porous surfaces for this.
Punches come in all kinds of fun shapes and sizes and are a great way to add interest!

Hiding a bystander with some die-cuts helps pulling the focus to the main subject of your picture.

Using a little glitter glue here and there helps to add that little Something Extra!

Two different examples of embellishing the same picture 🙂

 

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Joyful Reminiscing – a Keepsake Album XL

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When I published the video for my Treasured Memory Keepsake Album XL, I got several requests for a tutorial. It took me some time to get around to it, but this summer I took advantage of my time off of work, and created another Keepsake Album XL of the exact same design, in order to write a tutorial.

It’s turned into a large tutorial for a large album :-), sporting 181 pages and a whopping 479 clear pictures to guide you through the step by step process! It will probably not be a “quick project” for you, which of course makes it ideal for the rainy Sunday afternoons that will probably soon dominate our upcoming fall weather.

So, without much further ado, I happily present to you my Joyful Reminiscing Keepsake Album XL, created with the beautiful Coral Couture paper collection by DCWV! 🙂

Click here to purchase the tutorial in my Etsy shop!

How to make a magnetized closure + ribbon pull

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A very short post this week, but the video content will make up for that!

This free tutorial shows you how I create magnetized closures with ribbon pulls, for mini albums and cards. I hope it’ll be of assistance and that it gives you some inspiration to create your own magnet-closed projects. 🙂

Have fun crafting!

 

 

Four Seasons Sturdy Folio Album

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Hi guys, I’m very happy to present my latest design: a very sturdio folio album, which I’ve therefore dubbed Sturdio 🙂 .

It consists of three accordion-fold page assemblies, rolled into one neat mini album. This one’s theme is the Four Seasons, since I used Graphic 45’s beautiful floral calendar collection Time to Flourish. I kept the months in their proper order, thereby creating three trimesters for one entire year of pictures.

I was completely in the Zone when I designed and created this, which is why I haven’t been able to write a tutorial. I promise I will write one this year, and thank you for your patience, for it will take me creating a second one of these sturdios.

Anyway, enjoy the video and pictures, and do let me know what you think in the comments section! See you next week! 🙂

 

 

 

Coffee Tray Altered to Photo Tray

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When I found a little gray-painted coffee tray in one of our local home decor stores, I decided it would be perfect for the Stationer’s Desk collection by Prima Marketing. With a lovely summer picture of my mom and dad during their Rome holiday, this collection combined just the right amounts of nostalgia and vintange romance.

Placed upright, any such tray can be turned into the perfect picture frame, adding unique shadow box qualities to what would normally be much more straight-forward and flat. It was great to be able to use up all of my larger flowers of the collection, and because of the many embellishments this project was also perfect for using up some of the scraps I had left over from the paper pad.

Another great advantage was that the tray’s gray color already coordinated perfectly with the papers, so I didn’t have to paint it myself.

All in all a very fun project to do if you’re looking forward to paper crafting but are not in the mood for creating a card or a mini album!

 

My Entry for #kaisercraftexchange!

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Last May Kaisercraft announced their Kaisercraft Exchange project, aimed at sending and receiving Happy (snail) Mail to and from people around the world, without knowing anything about them except their name and address.

I immediately signed up, for it’s always a lot of fun to create specifically with someone else in mind!

I chose the Be-You-Tiful collection and designed a new wallet card, to be sent to a lady called Kirstie, in Pacific Pines in Australia (hi Kirstie, hope you’re reading this! 🙂 ) I also added a small a mini album to keep pictures of her loved ones, to keep in her purse.

For both of these designs together I only needed 2 sheets of 12×12″ cardstock and 5 sheets of 12×12″ double-sided design paper (including two cutapart sheets with some lovely sentiments).

I also wrote a 29-page tutorial for the wallet card, which you can find in my Etsy shop for a small price, to help me keep doing what I do.

 

 

Photo Folio “Travel Light” – For Your Holiday Memories

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My mom and I went to Gran Canaria last May, one of Spain’s Canary Islands just off the southern coast of Morocco. I was really looking forward to designing something new to hold my pictures. I decided to try my hand at a photo folio, using K&Company’s gorgeously vintage Travel collection – which had been waiting in my stash for just the right project.

So here’s a brand-new design, into which I managed to get 82 pictures, most of which sized 5×7″ (13×18 cm)! Meanwhile, its spine still is only a meager 1⅛” (3 cm). Suffice it to say I’m very pleased with this project, which took me a couple of weeks to come up with and wrap my head around some design issues.

And of course there’s a tutorial for you, available in my Etsy shop! It has 55 pages and a whopping 136 pictures – check it out for it is very affordable. 🙂

Hope you enjoy, stay crafty!

 

Also check out the second iteration of this photo folio, with the Say Cheese III collection!

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30th Wedding Anniversary Explosion Box

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A short while ago a lady asked me to create an explosion box to suprise her husband for their 30th wedding anniversary. She had seen my Still in Love explosion box, and hoped I could create a similar one, but of course customized to her specific likes and wishes.

Since I still had enough of DCWV’s Natural stack, I set out to create another one of my explosion boxes. It has two layers with an altered miniature treasure chest hidden inside. The lady sent me some thoughts and feelings about her beloved husband, and some pictures of her family and their dog, all of which I incorporated as creatively as I could.

I was very happy to hear that the lady and her beloved loved it and are continually adding little personal memorabilia to it!

Like to create an explosion box yourself? Check out my tutorial, explaining the process of creating a three-layer explosion box in 80 pages and 190 pictures!

So, here’s the end result, enjoy!

 

The first two tags of these three were made with some tag die sets by Crealies:

 

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The Easiest Mini Albums Ever Made

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Creating mini albums can be quite a lot of work, demanding precision, dedication and, above all, time. Which is why I decided to go the other way this time, and set out to create what I wanted to be the easiest mini albums ever made, while still deserving of the name mini album. I wanted to be able to finish them within 2-3 hours, while not needing a lot of materials and tools. Also, they needed to be able to hold a reasonable amount of pictures.

Today I’m sharing the results of my experiment – which were a success for these mini albums are in fact so simple that no tutorial is required! The only things you need are the materials and some tools:

  • double-sided design paper
  • very light-weight chipboard (or heavy cardstock)
  • paper trimmer
  • wire binding tool like the Cinch or the Bind-It-All.

The largest of the albums will hold up to 68 pictures, the smaller one about 25.

Just watch the video and you’ll immediately know what to do to make these 🙂 Have fun!

 

 

The card I created with the leftovers: