DIY: Halloween Card Album

 I recently shared the card album I made with my daughter's cards and I wanted to show you this one as well. If you're as sentimental as I am and save every card you or your child is given, then this is a great way to keep them together and organized. It's also a great way to honor them and be able to share them with others. We love Halloween around here and my son has received lots of fun cards over the last 6 years that I've kept in a box. I decided I had enough of them to make a decent sized mini album out of them, so I got to work!

 

I cut & covered a piece of cardboard with scrapbook paper and embellished it. You can buy premade album covers, but using cardboard was fast, cheap & easy!

 

I decided to keep them in chronological order, so I made little dividers (the orange square) and wrote the year, my son's age at the time, and what he dressed up as that year, on each of them.

 

Some cards are harder then others to bind due to weird shapes & textures, but I used "The Cinch" binding tool and that helped a lot. You could always use a paper punch to make holes to line up with your rings or spiral wire if you don't have one.

 

When I got to the end of the Halloween cards, I realized that I had just a few Thanksgiving cards (yes, my family loves to give cards!) so I added those at the end of the album.

 

You could make a card album to hold any type of card you want to save & remember~think holidays, birthdays, babies, etc. It's fun to go through the old cards with my son, and now they're a special keepsake. I have this album out on display in my home right now--it fits in nicely with our Halloween decorations!

DIY: Card Album

I'm the sentimental type, so I have saved each and every card my 2 children have ever received.  My storage system is simple; I file the cards in a XL sized photo box in chronological order. (They are both still young so each child just has 1 box so far.) Occasionally I'll take them out of the closet and flip through them or show my kids the cards they got for their first birthday or Halloween and many other occasions. We all enjoy looking through them, so I wanted a way to get them out of the box. Here's what I do with all the Christmas cards we receive each year.

I decided that I'd group them by occasion and put them in small albums, starting with my daughter's birth. We received lots of cards for her baby shower and after she was born, so there were enough to support an entire album.

I pulled this old Covey 3-ring binder out of the closet & decided to repurpose it! It's the perfect size to hold cards. I Mod Podged patterned scrapbook paper to the front, back, and binding to hide the printing that was on it. Here's what the inside looked like...It's solid grey, so I didn't have to cover anything on the inside:

I then had fun embellishing the front cover with more paper, stickers, chipboard, glitter paint, and bling! I tied some tulle around it also.

I then got busy punching holes in all the cards. I used The Cinch Bindery Tool-Version II to punch all the holes. (Got it for Christmas--highly recommend it!) If you don't own one, you can always punch your holes with a 3 hole punch. It was a little challenging since each card is a different size, shape & thickness and I even messed a few cards up a little...but it was my first time to try it and I made it work! :)

 I added a typed sentiment to the inside cover of the album (matted on patterned scrapbook paper) that says:

Madelyn Reese McGarity

My Sweet Little Baby Girl,

These special cards are from our dearest family and friends.

Most were given along with a gift for you at your baby shower

or soon after your birth to welcome you into the world!

Love, Mommy

I'm glad I can easily flip through my daughter's cards now and I plan on displaying the album at her birthday party to share them with our family. Of course one of my next projects is to tackle my son's baby cards by making a similar album. I've already made an entire album out of his Halloween & Thanksgiving cards from over the last 5 years, which I'll share with you this Fall. If your family is the card-giving type like mine is, this is a great way to store them and honor them.

Since I've got a baby theme going on...Here's an article I wrote a while back with a step-by-step guide to creating a pregnancy scrapbook.

December Daily Album (Pages 1-17)

As promised, I am finally getting around to posting my December Daily album. What is it? you ask. Well, it's basically a mini scrapbook album put together AHEAD of time (in November) so that it's ready to be filled with photos, goodies, & journaling from each day in December. It could be done any month or for any occasion, but since December seems to fly by in the blink of an eye, it is a great month to document. None of this is my idea, but the artfully contagious brainchild of one of my favorite scrappers, Ali Edwards. (yeah, I mention her a lot. Have you checked out her blog yet?) Here is Ali's December Daily Album from this year.

The thing I am most proud of is that I DID NOT BUY ONE SINGLE ITEM TO MAKE THIS ENTIRE ALBUM! I raided my stash & came up with more than enough stuff to use.
I can add or take away as I see fit once I have my photos ready to put in. It's meant to be filled each day, so that at the end of the month you have a completed album. However, I don't have a good enough photo printer at home, so I simply wrote down on a piece of paper what happened on each day. I will have my photos printed and when I get them back, I'll slip them into the album & know exactly what to write about for that particular day. Does that make sense to anyone else but me?

Here's the cover & days 1 through 17 (to be completed when I get my photos)