Manilla Envelope Mini Album

Today I have another mini album to share with you.... 

I made it to hold before and after photos of a renovation and I used some materials and techniques that I haven't used before. I started with six 6x9 inch manilla envelopes. 

One envelope is full size. It will be the back cover and the flap will wrap around and fold over the front. (pictured on the right) I cut off the flap and removed the clasp from three envelopes. (bottom left) Those will be pages that have a pocket at the center of the book. The last two envelopes are cut down to 6.5 inches long. (top left) Use any combination you like. I would have made all my pages have the little pockets, but I had already cut two envelopes down to 6.5 inches and didn't want them to go to waste! The open end of the envelope serves as a pocket already, so the little pocket is just a bonus. 

The base for my tags or inserts is a Diet Coke carton. I cut pieces to the size I wanted and ran them through the Cuttlebug in embossing folders. Two have woodgrain, one is a checkerboard, and one looks like cracked glass. Then I dry brushed some black acrylic paint on the solid brown side to help bring out the embossing (ink would work, too) and I painted around the edges of the backside to cover the logos.

 I cut a few mats from kraft paper and a few more from some yellow paper that is almost the same color as the envelopes. I also added some dictionary pages just for fun. Here's what I did to them....

I tore a page out of an old dictionary that I bought just for this kind of thing. Then I picked out a couple of colors of acrylic paint that I thought would look nice in this book--a dark blue and sandstone. I think the tool that I show in the pictures is a thing that's used to spread frosting. Henceforth it shall be called the "scraper." I saw this done with a credit card, but this scraper was handy, so.... I ran a line of the sandstone paint along the edge of the scraper and added a couple dots of the blue. Then I pressed the edge of the scraper to the edge of a page and pulled it across, leaving streaks of paint behind. 

Each page came out different. This is a whole lot more enjoyable than the other kind of scraping paint! It was so much fun that I even tore out another page for the back cover and the flap. This is how the mats turned out:

And this is how they look when adhered to the tags:

Here you can see the back cover and the front flap. Next time I scrape paint this way I want to stamp an image on top of the paint and see where that goes!

I cut and embossed the frame and attached a piece of twine
under it. The twine wraps around a ginormous eyelet on
the flap to hold it closed.

I left a half inch for the binding when I cut the envelopes to 6.5 inches. So I covered all the envelopes with 6x6 inch squares of patterned paper, leaving that extra half inch uncovered. Then I used my Cinch to punch holes for the binding wires in the bottom edge of the envelopes.  

 I'll probably include some kraft paper

mats when I send this off. Some of  the background paper is pretty busy.

Pretty long post, right? I glad you stayed with me! If I have another post like this one I'll try to split it up into a couple of installments. I feel a little loopy tonight, so I hope it wasn't too hard to follow. The band had its first competition Saturday and I'm still trying to catch up. Those things are EXHAUSTING!

Go dig out something you haven't used for a long time and see what you can do with it. My "something" was acrylic paint. I use it quite often, but never for cards or scrapbooks. I think it worked perfectly for this book!

Thanks for stopping by! See you next time!