Floral Mini-Album Pt 14 Working on the Small Tags for Pages 1 and 4

Recently I made a new mini-album, about my mum who died in December. I was unable to publish anything about this until now because it is a present for her best friend, who sometimes visits my blog, and I wanted it to be a surprise for her. I wrote a series of blog posts as I did each stage of the project, so I didn’t forget what I did, and they will be published in sequence now the project is finished and has been given to our friend.

If you want to see the finished project, please click here.

This session is about the work I’ve done on the tags to go in the pockets on pages 1 and 4.

Beginning with page 1, I cut the large and small frame from the new frames die I got at the recent craft show (see what a bargain I got!!), from a piece of scrap gold card, and stuck these down with Crafter’s Companion Stick and Stay spray adhesive. There will be photos or embellishments stuck in these frames eventually.

Note added later: Crafter’s Companion Stick and Spray adhesive isn’t very good – I find things lifting after a short while, and I’ve found that applying Scotch Quick Dry Adhesive or any other good wet glue with a precision applicator is the best way to attach delicate die-cuts.

I then turned to the tag I’d started making, which goes in the triangular pocket on the bottom left of page 1. In this photo you can see the original paper and the inking I did with Barn Door Distress Ink, stage 1 of triple distressing around the edge – a nice generous layer applied with a blending tool.

Stage 2 in the triple distressing was with Vintage Photo Distress Ink.

Stage 3 was with Black Soot Distress Ink, just on the very edge.

The pieces matted onto the back of the tags. You can see my double-sided taping equipment – following a brilliant technique I saw on Youtube, if you put a credit card flat on the piece, lined up with where you want to cut the tape once it’s stuck down, you can tear the tape against the card and it cuts it really cleanly. By doing this, you don’t have to put the roll of tape down and pick up the scissors and faff about cutting the tape. I peel back one end of each bit of tape just a little and fold it outwards, and peel the backing off once the piece is lined up correctly – this gives you a bit of wriggle room.The glue stick is really useful for this, too – for the centre of the piece, if you want to add a bit of DS tape or ATG adhesive – once it’s down, you can’t remove the backing, but if you remove it, and then run the glue stick over the tape, this also gives you some wriggle room and as one person said on Youtube, this actually makes the DS tape stronger once it’s dry. This technique is also very useful when the piece of DS tape is too short to use the first method – just pull off the entire backing strip and run the glue stick over the whole length of tape.

Here are the two tags, the left one showing the front side, and the right one showing the back, one for each copy of the album.

Here they are, inserted into the triangular pockets on page 1.

I’m actually quite happy with the background I did on page 1 now, especially with the addition of the frame and the tag.

Moving on to page 4, I made myself a little bracket shaped template in order to make the tags to go in the pocket on that page. The rather dull grey-ish paper from the paper stack was improved somewhat with some double distressing, first with Dusty Concord and then with Black Soot Distress Inks.

Here is the tag in place in the pocket. I like the shape of this, because it echoes the brackets you get on the beginning of each stave of music.

Here is page 4 lined up with page 5, to show how the double-page spread will look.