Floral Mini-Album Pt 16 Tags and Tabs for Pages 1-4

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.

I have discovered a very useful tutorial on Youtube for using your envelope punch board to make tabs. I decided to make tabs for the page tags, to make it easier to pull them out, and also to indicate that there is actually a tag inside the page to be pulled out! The tabs also add a decorative element.

I cut the tabs for the page 1 and 2 tag rom the red paper from the paper stack, and punched them with the envelope punch board, and rounded the bottom corners with my corner rounder punch. I inked half of each tab piece with Dusty Concord Distress Ink, using an ink blender, and then distressed the very edges all round with Black Soot Distress Ink.

I put 1” wide double sided tape on each side of the tab, and trimmed the excess with a small pair of curved scissors.

The tabs folded over and stuck down onto the top edges of the two tags, with the inked side on the page 1 side of the tag, and the plain one on the page 2 side, to match that paper.

Here are the two pages (one for each album) with the tags inserted, showing the tabs at the top.

This is what the tags look like when they are pulled out.

I didn’t do a lot to the paper I chose for the tag for page 3; just some double distressing, first with Hickory Smoke, and then with Black Soot Distress Inks.

Page 4 needed a bit more work. At this stage I forgot to photograph the paper as it was, but you can see it in the photo that follows. I also forgot to photograph the process for altering this paper, but I smooshed it with Pumice Stone Distress Ink first of all. This is a very subtle colour and is useful just for dulling down rather bright colours. My ink pad needs re-inking so I had to repeat the process, and afterwards, because it still didn’t show up very much, I applied ink onto the paper with an ink blender, and spritzed it with water, and dried it with my heat gun. I am quite pleased with the result.

This photo shows the double distressing I did on these tags, first with Frayed Burlap Distress Ink, which is a very similar colour to Pumice Stone, only slightly darker – nice and subtle – and finished with Black Soot.

This photo shows the tag matted and layered on black cardstock, and lying on top of the original, unaltered paper from the paper stack. Unfortunately I had problems with this photo too – not sure what was going on with the camera – the light was most peculiar and the colours were not right, and after manipulating it in my photo editor, the original paper is almost right (a bit darker in reality) but the tag has come out too brown!

Moving on to making the tabs for these tags, I cut them from the drab grey-ish paper from the paper stack (small sample in the centre of the picture) and punched them with the envelope punch board as before, and inked them as follows: for page 3, I used Peacock Feathers Distress Ink, and for page 4, Dusty Concord, and distressed the very edges of both tabs with Black Soot Distress Ink.

Here they are, in situ on the two tags – the left one shows the side for page 3, and the right one, for page 4.

You will see that in this case, I have glued the tabs onto the centre of the tags. Here are pages 3 and 4 with their tags in place.

This is how they appear with the tags pulled out.

Finally, laying them under pages 1 and 2, you can see how the tabs line up. On the left you can see page 1 on top, and on the right, page 4 is on top (for the 2 albums).

There won’t be a tab on the tag for the final page, because it has a flap that can be used to pull it out from the page.