Doggies having fun!

Hello again and I hope everyone is enjoying this fabulous sunshine while it lasts - we are forecast thunderstorms for the weekend!  Not much crafting getting done here - its far too hot in the house and we are spending as much time as we can in the garden or at the beach.  The dogs are loving their dips in the sea and rolling in the sand.  Not great for long haired dogs but worth the effort of getting them brushed again to see them having so much fun.

Here's a card I made for a recent swap which was to use die-cuts.  I love this set of X-Cut Haberdashery dies I got for my birthday and use them a lot.

I used a piece of striped material for the background to my kraft card, then wrapped that with some tape measure ribbon and some orange fibres.  The die-cuts have been enhanced with some rose quartz Treasure Gold which gives them a lovely metallic look.  I was particularly chuffed with the die-cut pin I cut in half and added to the Tim Holtz price ticket - love that effect.  The line of stitching down the right hand side of the card was also die-cut using a die in the set and there's another one with cross stitches .  Really, the whole set is brilliant, containing 20 dies.  I hope they bring another set like this - retro kitchen equipment would be nice!

Keeping my fingers crossed for a few more lovely sunny days!  Love, Margie x

Captured Memories - rubber band mini-album for Our Creative Corner

Hello friends and a special welcome to those who have popped over from Our Creative Corner.  Its really nice to see you here again.  Linda on our Design Team set us a lovely challenge this month.

Captured Memories
Memories are fleeting but photographs help us hold dear those special people and times. Our project this month is for you to share with us how you capture your cherished memories. All types of art are welcome: cards, tags, canvases, mixed media, etc., but your project MUST INCLUDE A PHOTOGRAPH. 

I wanted to make a mini-album to hold some treasured photos and I really enjoyed putting it together.

I was captivated by the examples shown by Paula Phillips (JournalArtista, Mixed Media mini books) and really liked the way she used the rubber bands to hold the pages which could then be pulled out to view the pictures like this.

So if you'd like to know how I turned an empty dishwasher tablet packet and four elastic bands into a super-easy album, read on.  But you'd better grab a cuppa first - its a long post!  First of all, I used a big craft knife to cut the empty packet slightly bigger than I actually needed then opened it flat and trimmed it with a ruler to the size of back and front covers I wanted  (12cm x 10cm) using the narrow side of the box (6cm) as the spine.

(Other brands will work just as well! )

You also need 4 rubber bands but more about them later on.  Next, the pages.  I made four concertina pages by joining strips of card and folding each length to make four 10cm x 10cm sections as below.

The super-easy bit is once you have decorated the cover (I used TH Kraft resist paper but I'm sure my artistic teamies would make a lovely job with paints and texture pastes) you just add the rubber bands to the spine as below.  I did use all brown bands in the end but used the red one in the pic so it would stand out.

Next, I decorated the pages.  Now, if you use 4 lengths of card as I did, that gives you 32 little squares to decorate and that's a lot of work!  I've actually only done 16 so far but will finish the rest later on!  A tip I really appreciated from Astrid was to cut a piece of card slightly smaller than your page, decorate that, then attach it.  This makes life a lot easier and you can juggle with the arrangement of your pictures before you stick them down.  I rubbed Rub'n'Buff round all the edges for that old fashioned look.  Here's all 16 decorated sections.  They include pics of my grandma, mum, auntie and a cousin as well as some "borrowed" family images.

My favourite picture?  Its this one of my Mum styling her friend's hair in their tea break!  Long, long time ago.... Look at her shoes!!

When you're all done decorating, you can slip the first section of each long page under its elastic band to hold it in place then concertina fold the rest of the sections into the cover.  I numbered my pages just so I could see where to pull them out.  This is one of the pages waiting to be inserted into its band.

Well, if you've got this far, I do hope you will be inspired to make a mini-album for yourselves.  The nice bit is you can add as many pages as you can fit in the cover - just keep adding rubber bands!

Thanks so much for visiting - I'd love to know what you think of my album and I also hope you'll join in this month with the Captured Memories challenge at Our Creative Corner.   Margie x