Upcycled Mini Album Tutorial

I feel like I'm treading water with my blog at the moment... the legs are going madly but I'm not getting anywhere. I have a queue of posts to send live and finding the time to sit down and work on them is escaping me at the moment... school holidays, renovations and life in general! Well enough said or I'll never get this post up.

DESIGNED FOR | Doodlebug Design Inc
PROJECT | Upcycled Mini Album

I recently produced this little mini album and the following blog post featured on the Doodlebug Blog (just in case you think you've seen it before).

Today's project is the transformation of a pre-loved children's book (we had two copies) into a fun birthday book for my youngest son. The concept of a birthday book is to take a photo on each birthday and write down a list of things that meant something to Teddy on each birthday ie. favourite toy, favourite song, favourite food, best friend, etc

I added a little Take Note Mini Pocket with Teddy's birthday details written on the note card inside and have you spotted the gorgeous new 'Sprinkles'.

So let's get started...
This little book was a fabulous shape and design for creating the birthday book but you could use any shape book and add your own tabs etc. I gave the book a light sand just to help the adhesive stick.

I gave my page a light spray with adhesive and set it aside for a few minutes to reach the tacky stage.

Next step is to place the book face down on the reverse side of the patterned paper and then cut around the outline of the book. I decided to use the Petite Prints collection so I could create a colour wheel affect around the book.

You need to leave a small margin between the pages at the inside spine or the book won't close properly. I decided to cover the gap with some washi tape in the same colour scheme.

It's a good idea to ink the edges in a similar colour to hide any rough patches that may occur. Doodlebug have a wonderful range of ColorBox inks to co-ordinate with the patterned paper collections.

For the cover I used my all time favourite patterned paper... Colorwave from the Take Note collection as it tied all the tab colours together.

Each tab represents each year of Teddy's life so I color-matched the age with the tab as I wanted the central panel to be the main focus rather than the numbers.

Final step was the decorating...

Now I just have to wait until Teddy reaches each milestone before I can fill in the other pages, although I'm not in any hurry to wish his life away from him too quickly. Thank you for stopping by today and I hope I have inspired you to have a re-think of what is sitting around your home that could be given a new lease on life.