A friend of mine got married a wee while ago now and I promised her a wee book as a congratulations. However she said that she would really like one that she could put some of her photos in...hmm...I haven't made any photo albums before thought I... Well, what would the world be without a challenge?! I have to admit that I have been extremely tardy in creating this, mainly because it was a constant learning curve and I kept making mock-ups and rejecting them! I think I have at least four that I dismissed as not good enough (don't worry I will find some other use for them).
Her bridal colour theme was this gorgeous deep turquoise and she used lots of soft ribbons and tissue paper in her favours so that was my starting point. I didn't want to create a hard-back book because I had decided that a small soft-back would be much more personal and tactile. I also wanted to use a couple of light crepe-style papers to give the top of the book 'ruffles' to remind the bride of her wedding dress (I think it was at this point that I started to think that this was almost taking as much planning as the actual wedding!). Because of this I had to layer several different types of paper to get enough stiffness in the covers to hold the weight of the inner pages and seperators (to give space for the photos). This came out really nicely though and I was happy with the final result.
The real challenge was the internal pages, both stitching them up with the seperators, and them stitching them onto the cover. Because each sheet was attached individually to the concertina seperator, it meant that they couldn't be bundled in signatures so each sheet meant a seperate line of stitching on the spine of the book. Phew, that was a LOT of work! However it did look really lovely when done (not sure I will choose to repeat it in a hurry though!).
I think my favourite bit is the spine feature though. I decided to make a feature of the ends of the threads from the stitched seperators so I knotted a seed bead onto each one and threaded them all through two slots in the cover so that they created a waterfall effect at the head of the spine.
Overall I am really pleased with how this came out, although I wish I had managed to complete it earlier! (Also I wish I had been able to take photos in natural light as the colour values are slightly off here, you get the idea though!) Definitely worth the challenge!
No comments:
Post a Comment