Embellishing a mini-album

I don’t usually need an excuse to make a project, but sometimes it’s nice to have one anyway! I love looking through the lists of crazy and unusual holidays that you find on some websites, and I discovered that today is Renewal Day. I made a mini-album, and seeing as renewal was the theme, I made a toilet-roll mini album (with flattened empty toilet rolls – a renewed purpose for them!) and then used my Slice to decorate and embellish it. I made this album with some reminders for myself about renewal, but mini albums like this make great gifts! You can add as many rolls as you wish; I used three for my project.

To cover each of the toilet rolls, you need a piece of paper that’s the following size:

1 roll length + 1”  x 2 roll widths + 1”

Here are the steps on how I covered each roll with patterned paper. All the papers for this project are from the Making Memories Dilly Dally collection.

Next comes the fun part with the Slice! I made heavy use of multiple design cards for this project. I love how you can use the design cards for multiple purposes. And even though my project had nothing to do with Thanksgiving, the font on the Turkey Daze card was exactly what I was looking for.

On the first roll, I cut the title from Basic Shapes 2. For the background, I layered the die-cut shaped paper that’s in the Dilly Dally 8x8 paper pack and matched up the stripes to add to the layering effect:

On the second roll, I used flourishes from the Basic Shapes 3 card.

On the third roll I made a layered banner from the Dilly Dally card (with dimensional glue dots to make it pop), then cut out the word Joy from the Basic Elements card.

The tags were all cut from the Basic Elements card. Then on each one I used an element from the pattern word block page in the Dilly Dally 8x8 paper pack. On the first one I used the font on the Turkey Daze card to cut out the letters for Hope. Hope is always a good thing to have renewed, right? The great thing about this font is that if you put the letters very close to each other, it looks like the letters are joined – very cool!

On the Hello Sunshine tag, I cut out a shape to look a bit like the sun. Actually, it’s one of the layer elements from a flower on the Dilly Dally card – just repurposed for the renewal album. Sunshine always makes me feel renewed! J

On the final tag, I played on the idea of the bee from the word block paper and wrote “Just Bee” (letters from Turkey Daze font again) to remind myself that sometimes I need to stop and just be, to feel like I’m being renewed.

I inked the edges of all the tags, then “renewed” some ribbon from a gift I’d received to add to the tags. I punched a hole in the corner of each roll and joined them together with a metal ring which I embellished with some more repurposed ribbon.

The Slice really is great for mini-albums – the different sizes of the shapes and fonts lend themselves perfectly to projects like this!

Of course, you could take Renewal Day to mean anything you want. Maybe your driver’s license needs renewal, or maybe your house needs some “renewing” paint… perhaps you have a friend who you haven’t heard from in a while and you need to renew contact. Just for fun, why not post a comment with your ideas and suggestions?

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~ Caroline ~