Giant Paper Bag Scrapbook Album

Last year our city banned plastic grocery bags.  It has been kind of a throw-back to the seventies before stores used plastic grocery bags and now stores give paper bags, unless you bring your own reusable bags.  At first the stores tried to charge extra for the paper bags, but they eventually realized customers balked and for the most part they do not charge for the paper bags.  We do bring our own reusable bags for the most part, but once in a great while we forget so we are given paper bags.  Well, these were really starting to pile up!  So I started saving a stack of them in my studio.  And finally I couldn't stand it any longer, I just had to make a paper bag book!

I took the handles off of each bag and then folded it in half.  I couldn't find my bone folder, but I remembered seeing that you could use the handles of your scissors in a pinch, so that is what I did to get a nice crisp edge on each bag.  I decorated each bag first with papers such as wallpaper samples, sheet music and paper scraps, and then with various clip-art images and journal spots.  The covers are made from an old Cheerios box covered in some handmade paper from my local scrapbook store.

 Since this book is super tall, I printed images at the largest size I could.  It also allows for big old journaling spots.

I added just one small lunch size bag inside one of the signatures.  That is the one with the orange polka-dots above.

Each bag has a small flap on the inside that I also included a tall, narrow journaling card on.  I adhered the pages back to back very carefully and bound it together with a sewn tapes binding.

And I made large pull-outs for the pockets for each bag.  Because of how big the bags are, I was able to make super big journaling spots.  And there is one on each side of each pull-out.

Journal for a Friend

I have been busy working on some gifts lately.  So much to do, so little time!  The page here is from a book for a friend's upcoming birthday.  The background papers are just random scrapbook papers and a couple of bits from some painted pattern pages I made in one of Mary Ann Moss's classes.  The image is one of the fun freebie ones that Land of Nod gives away.  And then I just included a journal card from a Project Life set.  I am decorating half the pages pretty much in the same way, some background papers, a quirky image, and a journaling spot.  I am leaving the other half of the pages blank (except for whatever the background happens to be) in order for my friend to fill them in as she likes.  I am just hoping to get her creative juices going with what I've included and see what she comes up with on the other pages. 

Calendar Journaling

For the month of May I wanted to try the calendar journaling that I had seen online.  It was easy enough to just jot something down each day of the month.  It's kind of cool, but at the end of the month I missed three days and today I couldn't remember a single thing from last Thursday.  Ha ha

Japanese Stab Binding

I have been playing around with some different bookbinding techniques.  I know the Japanese Stab Binding technique already, but I liked the duct tape on the tutorial I saw over at Cocoa Daisy.  I tried my hand at a little painting and stamping too from a Cloth, Paper, Scissors video.  I love online learning.  Always so fun!

Another upcycled project

Another one of my upcycled book projects.  On this one I tried a new stitch I had learned in another one of Mary Ann Moss's classes.  I believe this one is called the Double X Binding.  There are 3 signatures in this one.  It's a little tricky because you are working with three signatures at once.  But I finally got the hang of it.  This was my first attempt at this type of binding.

I put it in my Etsy shop.