Christmas Album - The Making

I bought a couple of downloads from two of my favorite digital artists on Etsy,   Tsunami Rose for the album cover and Ephemera's Vintage Garden for the pages.

I began by printing everything out on my laser printer.  I glued the covers and spine to chipboard induct them out and glued them together using the lighter colored paper strips.

Next I glued on a strip of paper near the top to underline the title and a couple of wood filigree pieces  near the bottom corners.

I also measured and punched small holes to bind my book using my large crop-a-dile.  I glued papers to the inside cover and used a brush and liquid gold leafing on the edges of the chipboard.

I then measured, cut and scored all the pages, then marked the spots to punch for the binding thread to bind the pages to the cover.

After marking and punching all the pages, I separated them into 3 signatures and sewed them to the cover.

Here is a view of the outside of the cover with all 3 signatures stitched in place.

And this is the view from the inside of the book.  You can see between each pair of printed pages are two blank pages.  

These two blank pages will be glued together to form full page pockets. You can see below how I have place the double sided tape to form the pocket.

In this view you can see all the pockets are glued together with the tape.

 Now that all the pages and pockets are formed I used my Martha Stewart punch on all the upper corners to round them and add detail.

Next I used my 1/2" corner rounder to round all the bottom corners of the pages.

Following that I used distress ink to darken the edges of all the pages to give them an old used appearance.

Then came the embellishments.  I bought all the digital ephemera downloads for this pattern.  I cut and scored all the pieces and used distress ink on all the edges.

And there was a ton of embellishments.

I started gluing these onto each page along with some Christmas tags from my stash.  It was pretty late at night by that time and I forgot to take pictures.

Check back tomorrow to see where everything ended up and all the finishing touches I added to the album.

Happy Crafting!