Floral Mini-Album Pt 17 Tags and Tabs for Pages 5 and 6

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 forgot to photograph the original papers for the tags for page 5, or to include the Infusions in this photo, but to begin with, I applied Violet Storms and Violetta infusions to the paper from the paper stack, and then added  Hickory Smoke Distress Ink all over, using a blending tool, to smooth out the texture a bit, and to darken it.

I distressed the edges with Black Soot Distress Ink (again, no photo, I’m afraid).

Moving on to the tag for page 6 (the reverse of the tag for page 5), this was another one which didn’t require much treatment because the original paper from the paper stack wasn’t too bad. I merely double-distressed the edges, using Peacock Feathers and Black Soot Distress Inks.

Here are the pieces, matted onto black cardstock.

I cut and inked the tabs for these tags as before. I cut them from a scrap from one of my Tim Holtz paper stacks (can’t remember which one, I’m afraid, as the papers have got muddled up). For the side showing on page 5, I used Dusty Concord and Vintage Photo Distress Inks, and for the side showing on page 6, Peacock Feathers Distress Ink, and I distressed all the edges with Black Soot Distress Ink.

I then proceeded to stick the tabs onto the tags, without thinking what I was doing, and twice I stuck them in the wrong place! I was able to remove them by softening the glue on the double-sided tape with my heat gun, but when I attached them wrongly the second time, I added a bit of Scotch Quick Dry Adhesive to restore the stickiness somewhat, and this did NOT want to soften with the heat gun, and when I pulled them off, they also lifted some of the colour from the printed paper. Grrrr. What a mess! I tried to cover the exposed white card with Peacock Feathers Distress Ink but you can see in the next photo that it still shows like crazy… I was so cross with myself for being so stupid, and all I can do is to try and add some judiciously placed embellishments when the time comes, to cover up this boo-boo!!

Here at last are the two tags with their tabs in the correct place – one showing the side for page 5, and the other for page 6.

This photo shows the tags in place, the first showing page 5, and the second turned over to show page 6.

Here are the pages again, this time with the tags pulled out, to show how they co-ordinate with their respective pages.

Pages 4 and 5 aligned, to show the double-page spread, complete with tags.

Here are all the pages, from 1-6, stacked up, showing how the tabs line up on the page edges. Not only do they enable the tags to be pulled out, but they also help turn the pages, as well as adding a decorative element.

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.

Floral Mini-Album Pt 15 Page Tags for Pages 1 and 2

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.

In this session I started work on the large tags to go inside each of the pages, which were constructed hollow for this purpose, and also to conceal the hidden hinge binding system.

Just a reminder of how the pages are constructed:

I began by cutting six pieces of black cardstock for the tags to go inside three of the four pages, and a larger piece for the final page – this was scored so that the shorter side would fold over as a flap.

I then decided which papers to use for each side of these tags, to co-ordinate with the pages as the tags were pulled out. I stuck them inside each hollow page so that I wouldn’t get confused as to which belonged to which page. On the left you can see pages 1 and 2 for both albums (page 2 is on the reverse of page 1), and pages 3 and 4, all with their tag pieces slipped inside.

In this photo you can see the same arrangement for pages 5 and 6, 7 and 8.

Beginning to work on the tag for page 1. At the back is the original paper, and at the front, the two tags, altered with the Infusions and Distress Oxides shown on the left – Violet Storms and Violetta Infusions, followed by smooshing with Wilted Violet and Candied Apple Distress Oxides (the latter is one of the new ones I got at the craft show). Once this was dry and the pieces were ironed to get rid of the wrinkles, I double-distressed the edges with the Distress Inks on the right – Dusty Concord followed by Black Soot.

The reverse of this tag, which will be visible when pulled out from page 2, was created with unaltered red card from the paper stack, simply distressed just at the edge with Black Soot Distress Ink. I don’t know what happened to the camera when I took this photo and the next one – the light was very peculiar and the colours weren’t right – I did my best with my photo editor but they still aren’t quite right, and they are also a bit out of focus.

Here are the two tags – on the left, showing the side for page 1, and on the right, the side for page 2. Again, trouble with the camera.

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.

Floral Mini-Album Pt 13 More Work on Page 1

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.

Returning to page 1, it definitely needed more work as it was rather boring – this is what it looked like:

I distressed around the edges first of all, using Barn Door, Dusty Concord and finally Black Soot Distress Inks, and then added some Infusions – Violet Storms and Violetta. I was really not happy with the result, which just looked a bit of a mess in my opinion!

Here is the page laid in place, to see what it looked like beside the inside of the front cover. Hmmm.

So I decided to add some Distress Oxides. I didn’t want to smoosh the page on my craft sheet as I would have very little control and I didn’t want to mess up the other side of the page either, so I decided on a new approach – did I invent this? Probably not – I expect others have done the same, but for now I shall call it Shoshi’s Directed Smooshing! What I did was rub the ink pad on the craft sheet as normal, and spritz it with water, and then pick up the ink on a small acrylic block and use this to smoosh onto the surface of the page. This actually worked pretty well.

I started with Wilted Violet, but it was all too pink-purple and I thought it needed a bit more orange, so I added Spiced Marmalade, which looked OK until I dried it with the heat gun, when it promptly started to turn green!! Too much else already on the page and it was obviously reacting with it. So I tried adding some Fossilised Amber and that did help a bit. The final one I tried was Fired Brick which didn’t really show up at all. This was the result. Hmmmm again.

You can see that during this session, I also made the tags to go in these pages, cut from remnants of the same paper used to line the inside of the front cover, to try to tie the two pages in together. With the tag in place on the page, it doesn’t look too bad.

Here is the page, again laid alongside the front cover. I think this will have to do – I’m not over-thrilled with the result.

With all the water treatment and repeated drying with the heat gun, the whole page got a bit buckled, so it had the heavy books treatment overnight in the hope that it would flatten it out OK.

I think it will be OK once I get lots of embellishments on it, which will distract one’s eye a bit!

Note added later: With time, this page really grew on me until in the end, I am very pleased with it. Sometimes it’s best not to jump to conclusions but to sit with it for a while and then decide.

Floral Mini-Album Pt 12 Waterfall Inside Front Cover

Trying to catch up with updating the posts about making the Floral Mini-Album! Originally I was doing this on a daily basis but I’m afraid that slipped somewhat… I have now started working on a box for this so thought I’d get back to updating this blog with the album posts.

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.

In this session, I returned to the inside of the front cover and began work on the waterfall mini. I found several very good tutorials for constructing these on Youtube – I needed to refresh my memory because it is a very long time since I did one. The last one I did was a special birthday card for my hubby back in 2010.

These are the pieces I have cut for the construction of the waterfall. If you look carefully, you can see that I have already sored the lines on the long narrow piece, ready to attach the square page pieces.

The smaller rectangular piece is the back piece; the rectangular white piece is to reinforce the back piece, and the long strip is the band that goes around the back and holds the waterfall in place. The square pieces are the pages.

The first step was to make the mats for the six pages for each album. In each of the next few photos, you can see the original pink card, and each step beside examples of the previous step, to see how the alteration progresses.

I was keen to achieve a colour scheme to reflect the background paper, co-ordinating the colours, but at the same time giving a bit of contrast in the texture, so I began by smooshing with Barn Door Distress Ink, in order to introduce some splashes of red in the pink.

It’s amazing the transformation of these rather boring papers that can take place with a few layers of different inks.

The second step was to smoosh each one with Wilted Violet Distress Oxide. This gave me the purple splash that I needed. Again, you can see some of the original card underneath, and the previous stage on the right.

I found that this treatment did more or less get rid of the text on the pieces, but I didn’t mind if a bit is still visible as it just added to the texture. Anyway, much of the surface of the squares will be covered with photos.

The final step was the double distressing of each one. The next photo shows phase 1 of this, using Dusty Concord Distress Ink.

Phase 2 – using Black Soot Distress Ink.

The finished mats attached to the pages.

I was now ready to begin constructing the waterfall. The next photo shows the addition of double-sided tape between the scored lines on the back piece. I used the red tape because it is stronger than the regular tape. You could use wet glue.

Starting at the bottom, I added the pages one by one, lining them up carefully so that they were even, and removing the backing from the tape as I attached each page.

Here are both waterfalls with all the pages added.

Propping up the waterfall and photographing it from the side, you can see how the pages overlap and how the scored back piece works – the scored card curves and causes the pages to “roll” over.

The back piece is reinforced with another piece of card. Here, I have added red double-sided tape and marked the centre, and I have cut the small piece of card for the tab, folded in half and glued at the folded end.

The folded tab attached. The reinforcing piece is sandwiched between the two open ends of the tab which is attached with Scotch Quick Dry Adhesive. This needs to be strongly attached, because it is by pulling on this tab that the mechanism works. After attaching the tab, I was able o stick the reinforcing piece down onto the back piece, again using the red double-sided tape.

Both waterfalls with their pull tabs attached, top and bottom views.

Constructing the mechanism. The long narrow strip is glued under the back and the sides folded around. This is hard to explain and it much easier to understand if you follow a video tutorial on this – plenty to choose from on Youtube.

In this photo, you can see that I have applied Scotch Quick Dry Adhesive, and when I fold that piece down, it will be strong and secure.

If I do this again, I shall make sure that the long strip is the same colour as the waterfall because in this case, the folded edges of the white card were visible at the sides of the waterfall. I had to paint them with black acrylic paint where they showed, and they miraculously disappeared!

The completed waterfall, ready to install.

It was at this point that I realised that when the mechanism was worked, the undersides of the pages would be visible, and would require mats. This photo shows the pieces already cut and waiting to be inked.

I began the process by smooshing them with Barn Door Distress Ink. This pink and orange paper seems to resist the ink even more than the other pages I have used with this treatment, and it took me ages doing all this inking because it kept beading up and pooling on the surface of the card and it took a lot of drying with my heat gun.

Smooshing again, this time with Dusty Concord Distress Ink.

Finally, smooshing with Wilted Violet Distress Oxide to get the effect I wanted.

Double-distressing the edges of the mats, using Dusty Concord and Black Soot Distress Inks as before.

The page back mats installed.

I am pleased with the subtle stripe which is still visible, and which make a gentle contrast between the page mats on the fronts and on the backs of the cards.

I attached the whole waterfall piece to the inside of the front cover using orange double-sided tape so that it would be firmly adhered.

Pulling on the tab, the mechanism works perfectly! It has a nice definite feel to it, which I am sure is helped by the addition of the reinforcing piece on the back. To close it again, you just push the tab in an upward direction and the pages roll back into place. It’s very satisfying to play with!

I am pleased with the rich colour scheme of this page.