Shaping: Creating A Shaped Mini Album

Practical Scrapper Kerri here with you today to share with you a shaped mini album all by hand.  How many of you are sitting there saying-"Really, no die cutting machine or pre-fabricated album from manufacturer?"  With a little bit of creativity, determination, and math you can create ANY--that's right ANY-- shape album for whatever the occasion.

Today, I'd like to share with you my owl-shaped baby milestone album that I create back in April for my cousin who just had baby July 1st. My favorite type of album to create are baby milestone albums.  I've done about 7 of them now, this one being the first shaped album.  Here's where I drew my inspiration from, this is what the baby's room was done in (owls) and it set the tone for everything.  I actually shared this photo with the practical scrappers design team, for some information on the perfect papers (and I know these ladies know their papers). 

 Fellow design team member, Audrey, recommended Little Yellow Bicycle's line "Hello Fall" and it took me a whole 3 minutes and 38 seconds to order it from the time I saw her post. The color were a perfect match for where I was heading with my design.

So, I had the perfect papers on their way, I knew the shaped of the album, now the fabrication part became interesting. I started with googling owl patterns/coloring pages and found the shape of the owl I wanted here. I traced him on some poster board, then came the fun part, figuring out how to make it open, and my other goal--to STAND on it's own.

This was the first take of cutting and tracing onto the poster board.  It met the goals of how I wanted it to open plus it would stand on it's own, but I forgot a very important  part--how in the world was I going to bind my pages?

I again resorted to my team, this time fellow administrators Christine and Erin.  Erin suggested maybe doing an accordion binding.  As soon as she mentioned it, I couldn't believe I forgot about it.  Back to the drawing board I went, this time starting with doing my binding.  I knew I needed 14 pages to create what I wanted so I went with a two inch binding seam.  Here's the sample one I played with:

This is a 3 1/4" x 12" piece of paper that I scored at 3/4" the entire length and punched holes in it with my crop-a-dile.

Here you can see me gathering every two folds and adding brads to create the slots that my pages would fit into.

Last, this is how my pages fit into the accordion  binding.  I ended up using 3 strips of 3 1/4" x 12" to create enough slots to hold 14 pages in my album.

Once I figured that out, I knew the original design was not going to allow my pages to fit into the slots and "match up" with cover.  I needed to add an extra 1" tab extended from the base of my owl to allow ample space so everything would line up.  Here's how he turned out:

This is the front cover.  You can see at the bottom of the body where I extended the 1" to account for the binding.

Here's the cover opened up.  I went with a Velcro tab to close/open the cover.

One thing I love to do with milestone albums is create space for pull out journaling/photos.  Every other month there is a little envelope like this on the back. In each envelope there are little pull out tabs that have lines to journal on one side and a space for a photo on the other with different baby milestones that happen around that time...example first smile, my announcement, my prints, rolling over, first foods, I can stand, I can walk.

What the pull out tabs look like.

On the months that I don't have a envelope with the milestone tabs I added a journaling card like this one here:

Supply List:

Chipboard and recycled cereal boxes

Pattern Papers: Little Yellow Bicycle "Hello Fall" Collection

*Note: There are some scraps from a DCWV stack as well.

Cardstock: Core'dinations

Inks: Tsukineko VersaMagic Chalk Ink, Gingerbread, Momento Rich Cocoa

Other Mediums: Copic Markers

Embriodery Floss

Twine

Ribbon

Stamps: Hampton Arts

Punches: Martha Stewart, Creative Memories, Stampin' Up, and Fiskars

To see more of my album pages you can check out them out here at my blog.  Hope you enjoyed my little mini album process, and hopefully it inspires you not to shy away from shaping your own personal creation!

Happy Scrapping!

**Designer projects are not always linked in our posts, but you can always find their blogs in our sidebar or in the staff tab**