Double-Stacked Mini Album (new!): Celebrate Every Day

It’s always super fun to design new mini albums! This time, I created an album with two sets of pages, one above the other. Hence, a double-stacked mini album 😉Almost all pages offer new page designs that I haven’t used in my previous albums.

There are six page assemblies, three above, three below, which together offer twelve interactive page layouts plus some large photo mats. The large front and back covers make up their own interactive pages, twice as large as the regular ones. The album has a magnetized closure and is crisp and clean on the outside, so it will easily fit into your book case.

I found that this design is perfect to create a large album with 6×6 inch papers and only a handful of 12×12 inch sheets. This makes it a lot more cost effective than an album with lots of large pages. The relatively wide spine offers ample room for you to embellish on the inside.

On its last two pages I used some special-folded paper ornaments. Both are covered in the downloadable written tutorial in my shop. For one of them I also made a free video tutorial, which will be available next week in a new blog post.

For this particular album I used the Optimist collection by Prima Marketing, including their sticky tabs, ATC cards, flowers, leaflets and brads.

I hope you’ll all enjoy this design just as much as I do!
If you wish to create this double-stacked album yourself, check out the written tutorial in my Etsy shop, which has 148 pages and 429 (!) pictures.

Please like, share & subcribe to this blog, my Youtube channel and my Pinterest! You can also follow me on Twitter.

 

Want to know what other people created with the tutorial? Check out the fanpage and see for yourself! 🙂

 

New design: A Micro Pocket Book

As you may have noticed by now if you’ve been following this blog, I really like to design and create what I call micro projects, small but fully functional paper craft products, perfect for your handbag or as a small but very personal gift. And great to use up those gorgeous scraps in your stash you can’t get yourself to throw away… 🙂

This week I’d like to share a new micro design: a Micro Pocket Book! I really like how this has turned out, and by now I’ve already created two! They are 3½ x 2¾” (9 x 7 cm), sport a magnet closure with a ribbon pull, three little pages + some extra room for photos/journalling, and a nice little pocket to tuck away tiny treasures. It was great fun to create them, especially because a simple change in design paper resulted in a second pocket book with an entirely different look and feel from the first.

Papers used were Bo Bunny’s Country Garden for the one and some sheets by Fabscraps for the other.

So here’s the show & tell video, plus some pictures below that. If you’d like to create this cute little micro pocket book yourself, there’s a PDF tutorial (28 pages, 65 pictures!) waiting for you.

 

Please like, share & subscribe if you like this project, that’s including Pinterest by the way, since a couple of weeks 🙂

Have fun, and stay crafty!

Springtime Dreams Keepsake Album Deluxe

When I first created my Butterflies & Stars Keepsake Album Deluxe back in the fall of 2013, I had no idea it would become quite the scrapbooking hit on Youtube – as per today, it has gotten nearly 460,000 views and the number is still growing! Wow!

Unfortunately I have no explanation for this, since I have not been able to repeat these results… Its sister albums Flora & Fauna, Fairytale Treasures and Country Garden all had their shares of views, and so did my other projects, but none of them ever came anywhere near that unique number. I guess Youtube moves in mysterious ways… Oh well…

Anyway, I received (and am still receiving) a lot of requests for a tutorial on this type of album, this ‘double-spined’ gatefold-like type of album that I’ve dubbed Keepsake Album Deluxe.

And I have some great news for all of those lovely people: I’ve now been able to create this tutorial, and it is huge! It sports 132 pages with 418 pictures!
And it’s available to you now as a digital download in my Etsy shop.

To write a tutorial I of course had to create the project, for I had to take pictures of every step of the process. So here’s the latest edition of my Keepsake Album Deluxe, created using Webster’s Pages’ Nest collection, and I’m calling it Springtime Dreams. 🙂

Enjoy the video and let me know what you think! 

 

Want to know what other people created with the tutorial? Check out the fanpage and see for yourself! 🙂

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Awesomeness: 1-sheet Interactive Card!

Sometimes you want to send someone an awesome card, but you don’t have the time to spend hours and hours of creating. That is why I love my quick scrap projects!

I designed this card from only 1 sheet of doublesided 12×12″ (30,5×30,5 cm) design paper, with just a couple of folds and cuts. I also added some cardstock for the tags, and a few little embellishments. This design helps you to create a luxurious, interactive card within less than 60 minutes of creating!

It also enables you to use up those single sheets of double-sided design paper you might still have left over from other projects.

Or, in my case, the design lets me indulge myself in just buying single sheets that really stand out from their collections, without having to buy the entire collections and all that goes with them 🙂

To help you all along I wrote a tutorial for you, which you can acquire for a very sharp price in my Etsy shop 🙂

Enjoy the video and pictures below, and stay crafty!

 

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Twice Upon A Springtime: Two Cute Little Minis

Continuing from last week’s one-sheet-challengeI came up with another challenge for myself – again, in the spirit of Spring and everything New 🙂

This time it was: How to Create Two Ring-bound Mini Albums out of Four Sheets of Design Paper (and some cardstock)

I don’t know about you but there are some paper collections I only ever bought a couple of sheets of. Like in my case, the Once Upon a Springtime collection by Graphic 45. (At the time I was so happy when I had managed to scavenge a few sheets of this wondrously lovely collection from the hidden corners of our local scrap shop. If only I had known they would reboot this entire collection all over again in 2015! 🙂 )

Another example of owning only a few sheets of a particular paper collection: sometimes I’ve got some sheets leftover from some large project.

Well, what to do with these if you’re not in the mood for cards? Here’s what: create two adorable little minis, and create them in two versions: a photo version and a notebook version.

You’ll need only four 12×12″ sheets of double-sided design paper and eight sheets of A4 cardstock. Plus some embellishments, and of course some tools and crafting supplies.

These little albums are relatively easy and fairly quickly to make, and they make great gifts! For instance, I filled one with photos and gifted it to my mother for Easter. The other I turned into a birthday gift for a colleague, who would now have a great little notebook to keep in her purse, with still room for a few treasured pictures if she wishes.

Like this idea? Great, check out my video below! And if you’d like to create some yourself – admit it, you have several four-sheet-sets left in your stash!! – hop on over to my Etsy shop to get the tutorial! It will be available from April 8th, it has 37 pages and 99 pictures and guides you through the process of creating the mini albums step-by-step.

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Happy Easter – With a Pocket-style Card Constructed from One Sheet of Cardstock!

It’s springtime! 🙂 Although it’s still pretty cold where I live here in the Netherlands, you can already feel a certain ‘softness’ in the air as days are lengthening and nature is preparing to wake up. I don’t know about you, but I’m totally game for spring!

And this year we’ll have a fairly early Easter. Normally I don’t send out any Easter cards (it’s simply not a Dutch tradition) but this year I felt like letting at least a couple of people know that I’m thinking about them and wish them some great times with the upcoming holiday.

I found this lovely sheet of paper by We R Memory Keepers, from their Cotton Tail collection, and it immediately took my thoughts to all the wonderful things that make up springtime and Easter.

So in the spirit of spring, I decided to design something new. I challenged myself to use only one piece of 12×12 inch cardstock for the construction of this card! Of course you will need some extra materials, but not a lot and the main items on that list are 1 extra sheet of cardstock for tags (A4 will suffice), and 1 sheet of 12×12 inch design paper. That’s about it! This design will enable you to create an elaborate and interactive card that is still quite affordable in terms of the supplies you need – awesome right?! 🙂

Also, this card is perfect for more than one sentiment and personalized message, it can function as a gift card holder and it will come in very handy as a vehicle for a group gift, when a group of people are giving one gift together.
And last but not least, you could also use it as a mini album page insert!

Good news: I’m making this design available to you all in my Etsy shop – and like the card itself this tutorial is also very affordable, so check it out!

And here’s the show & tell video, enjoy and let me know what you think!

 

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Rose of Encouragement – An Interactive Wallet Card

If you want to try your hand at this interactive wallet card yourself, please check out the tutorial I wrote for you, which you can find in my Etsy shop.

NEWS flash: this tutorial is now also available in Dutch – email me if you’re interested! Plus, several card kits to make this particular card are now available as well! 🙂


Recently Jessica, a young lady from the USA whom I had never met before, contacted me via Youtube, proposing a project swap. I loved this idea, as well as the great spontaneity she showed with this initiative, and we agreed to a friendly card challenge. I set the theme, she added some parameters. So here’s the homework we gave ourselves:

Create an interactive, not too bulky wallet-type card around the theme Encouragement. The projects would have to be true to our individual styles and personalities. Extra criterium was to try and make the message to the other person as personal as we could – without us actually knowing eachother… So we’d have to find our inner Encourager, as it were. 🙂

So, in the video below you can check out what I came up with! This wallet card measures 5.75 x 5.75″ (14.5 x 14.5 cm) and is of my own design. It has pockets, tags, layered layouts and several interactive closures. It’s perfect for more than one sentiment and personalized message, it can function as a gift card holder and it will come in very handy as a vehicle for a group gift – when there are several personal messages by different people and/or gift cards needing to be tucked away into one awesome card 🙂

I used Kaisercraft’s Lady Rose collection, which is stunningly beautiful, feminine and timelessly on trend. Plus, it has some great and encouraging sentiment labels which fit this challenge perfectly!

And here’s the video of the card Jessica created for me! So thank you again Jessica, for your lovely card and your great initiative – an encouragement in and of itself! And for those of you who’d like to see what Jessica’s up to, check out her website, which you can find at AT2 Design.

 

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Loose Change – A Twelve Pocket Folio

Sometimes people send me some photographs, maybe a picture of me and them during a party or a family event, or just a photo update of their little baby. And sometimes they use these pictures as cards – writing a personal message to me on the back. This doesn’t happen super often, but enough to make me want to store these pictures neatly together. Also, I’d like to preserve any notes or personal messages on the backs of these photos.

So I came up with a quick and easy design for a folio: thin, light-weight and without any photo mats since I wasn’t going to glue anything down. I just needed pockets that would fit 10 x 15 cm (4×6″) pictures, and I chose to create twelve – a number that would fairly easily fit onto two pages, keeping the folio super thin. Also, twelve is perfect if you wanted to do something like a year in review or baby’s first year, or some such.

I’m calling this design Loose Change, for it’s intended specifically for pictures you do not want to glue down, and want to change regularly.
This design of course enables you to preserve any hand-written notes on the backs!

In case you’d like to create one yourself, there’s a tutorial waiting for you in my Etsy shop.

Thanks for watching and please feel free to leave a comment below! You can also help support this blog by clicking the Like button 🙂

Life’s a Picnic – an interactive mini album (tutorial available!)

Recently I went through my design paper supply (which has grown to quite the little stash) and stumbled upon Basic Grey’s Lucille paper pad. Lucille is a romantic paper with vintage fashion overtones, colorful but a little toned down and very sophisticated. A fabulous design paper, and I decided I instantly had to use it to create a mini album! 🙂

This 6 x 6.5″ pocketstyle mini album has 14 interactive layout pages, including the insides of both covers. The covers are chipboard with a reinforced binding for durability. The pages are constructed from multiple layers of heavy-weight cardstock and patterned papers. Features include large pull-out photo mats, special closures (like magnetic, or swing tabs), lots of flaps and pockets holding journaling tags and photo mats and much more! Details abound throughout this album such as punched borders, micro booklets, flowers, brads, specialty die-cuts, ribbon and trim, and specialty cut-aparts. There are 5 large pull-out photo mats and several flaps and tags inside with room for approx. 45-50 small and regular-sized photos.

And: I wrote a tutorial for those of you who’d like to make one yourselves – my first for a mini album! 🙂 You can check it out in my Etsy shop.

Check out my baby version and Christmas version of this pocketstyle album design – their page design is not exactly the same, but they give you a pretty good idea of how different styles and colors would look. If you’d like to see a version with photos inside, check out my Ancestry mini album!

Anyway, enjoy the complete show & tell video, and have a great week!

 

Opened my Etsy web shop!

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Well, it wasn’t very long ago that I told you about my New Year’s resolution to open my own web store. At the time I thought it would take me at least a couple of months longer, and I was striving to get it up by March or April. But sometimes you surprise yourself by taking an unexpected leap forward – as in my case, for my Etsy shop is now up and running!

So woohooo! I’m a shop owner! 🙂

There’s not many product listings in it yet of course, only three to start with, since it’s only been up like a minute. One if which is a downloadable tutorial by the way, of my Explosion of Joy explosion box.

From now on I’ll be writing more tutorials, which is a time consuming process so I won’t be able to add one every week so to speak. However, I can promise you at least two more in the upcoming 2 months, with the third planned in March/April.

Anyway, I’m very excited of course, this is truly a new direction for me! Hopefully it’s the start of another great way to share my designs with you all and making them more available and accessible to those of you who wish to create your own projects but don’t know how 🙂

So here’s the video, with clear instructions on how to find my shop on your own – that is, if you haven’t bookmarked it after your first visit of course! 😉

Don’t forget to like this post and subscribe to my blog. And once on Etsy, you can add my store to your favorite shops for easy access!

You can also share this on Facebook or Pinterest, or email it to a friend. Simply use the buttons below.

Group Gift Explosion Box

This style of explosion box combines two of my previous styles of decorating: 1. designpaper only; 2. photos only.
This one makes for a great gift idea if you’re giving this as a group of people, like your entire family, or a group of colleagues – like in this case with this particular explosion box. For it has both design paper and photos, and a new element: several personalized messages, printed onto the design paper itself!

And by the way, there’s an explosion box tutorial available in my brand spanking new Etsy shop – called Creator’s Image Studio! 🙂 This tutorial was based on the Explosion of Joy explosion box, but it resembles this one in most of the designs and techniques, so check it out in my Etsy shop!

I’ll post an “official” shop announcement video in my next blog of course, but I thought I might mention it now, since the first tutorial in the shop is on an explosion box 😉 .

So enjoy the video – please like if you do & feel free to leave a comment! And don’t forget to check out the explosion box tutorial in my Etsy shop!

 

 

Cuteness in a Box – a Gatefold Micro Album

Time for some super cuteness! 🙂

This tiny gatefold micro album measures 3½ x 2⅜ x 1½ inches! (9x6x4 cm) It comes with its own little box, with sides that fold open for easy access. The box measures  2⅜ x 4⅛ inches (6.5 x 10.5 cm).

I haven’t got a tutorial yet, but as of this year I’m writing tutorials for several of my upcoming projects, which will be made available through my new webshop (which I’m also working on). So stay tuned! – EDIT 2020: The tutorial is now available!

Design paper used: Ancestry by K&Company. I’ve used this paper before, on a large mini album, so check it out.

And here’s the video, enjoy – and please let me know what you think in the comment section, and by liking & subscribing!