Paris Week Day 1

Hi!

You may have guessed from the title of my post that I'm doing a week's worth of posts about my recent trip to Paris.  You'd be almost right - I'm doing 4 days worth of posts, as I have a new Festive Friday card for you on Friday.

Before I left for Paris I made a Smash Album to take along as a travel journal and a place to keep the memorabilia we collected on our way.  You can see my original post of the finished Album here.  Before we left on the trip I was able to make a Cover for the Album to protect it and also to help keep the bits and pieces from falling out.  Today's post is about the Album Cover.

I used the gorgeous Deck the Halls Designer Series Fabric to make the Album Cover.  I had received the fabric as a Secret Santa gift and wanted to use it on something special. This certainly fit the bill! I had a scrap of Pink Pirouette 1 1/4" Grosgrain Ribbon left in my stash that I used to keep it all closed.  I tied the ribbon a bit loosely so that I could just slip it on and off rather than having to untie and retie the ribbon all the time.

This is the Album Cover half open.  It has flaps on each side to make sure that nothing can fall out of the Album.  The pages were made with Mini Lunch Sacks and things were just tucked inside, so I thought the Cover was a necessity.

Here is the Album Cover fully open.  You can see that it's a big 't' shape.  To make the Cover I just cut some chipboard to size, lay it out on my fabric and cut around it so that the fabric was all one piece.  I then used that piece as a template to cut the second piece of fabric.  I used a different pattern in the fabric pack for the inside.  I then laid out the chipboard on the fabric, placed the other piece of fabric over the top and pinned where I wanted the seams to go.  I sewed between each section of chipboard to stop them from moving around.  It probably wasn't a very technical way to make the Cover, but I'm a fairly proficient sewer so I was confident I could make it work.  If you want any more details about how I sewed the Cover just email me or leave a comment.

Here's the Album closed again, but from the side.  I used two of my precious (retired) jumbo brads so that I could thread some ribbon through the Cover to attach to the Album and keep it from slipping out of the Cover when it was open.

Stay tuned, tomorrow I will be back with some photos of how the Smash Album and Cover looked when we got back from Paris.  Later in the week I'll have some of my favourite photos out of the 3500+ we took!

Supplies: Deck The Halls Designer Series Fabric, Very Vanilla Satin Ribbon, Pink Pirouette 1 1/4" Grosgrain Ribbon (retired), Pewter Jumbo Brads (retired), Crop-A-Dile, Chipboard (I used some backing from the Glitter Paper packs), Sewing Machine and Thread.

Bye for now,

Tina