Today I’m going to share a few different ways to label your albums and how you can dress them up a little. Let’s start with dressing them up or making them your own. I like to do this with themed albums. One of my favorites is the album I created for our Disney trip in 2008.
This is a red 12×12 linen album that I purchased through Stampin’ Up! years ago that has since retired. I created a template using a couple different sizes of circles and black acrylic paint to add the mouse ears. It looks so awesome in person and just adds a nice touch to the album.
I have a school album for each of my kids. It holds their school and class photos, report cards, certificates, stories and a few pieces of artwork. I really wanted to customize the albums with something school themed so I created a little cluster of images and printed it on an iron on transfer sheet and added it to the front of this linen album. Here’s a closer look.
To create the artwork, I used Stampin’ Up!s retired My Digital Studio program. But you could use Photoshop or any other digital program to create something similar.
This album is an 8×8 Christmas album. I loved the stripes but wanted to dress it up a bit so I took one of the handmade cards I received that year, cut off the back and stuck it to the front of the album using a strong adhesive. Simple but a great way to personalize it a bit.
This album is one of Stampin’ Up!s 6×8 Project Life albums (Espresso spine #135293 or plain kraft #139655). It has a heavyweight kraft cover that screams to be decorated. I used a combination of stamps and die cuts to dress up this album.
As far as labeling albums, for the most part I just use the label holder on the spine of the album.
However for the themed albums, I like to use a bit of ribbon and create a tag. This is also a great solution if the album doesn’t have a label holder on the spine.
Above is the spine of the school album. And below is the Disney album.
By labeling the spine, it makes it easier to identify the album.
This is the cupboard where I store some of my albums. I’ve outgrown this cupboard so the rest of them are stored in our spare room in an IKEA Expedite (now called Kallax) storage unit. I’ve used Stampin’ Up!s black faux leather 12×12 albums (#135292) for our family albums up until I started doing Project Life. The Project Life albums are the striped Project Life albums from SU! (#138468). And the mismatched ones on the lower shelf are the themed albums. I have one for each of the kids with layouts that I’ve done just for them, each of their school albums, one of me growing up, our Disney trip and our Caribbean cruise. Since I’ve started using the pocket page system, I don’t do a whole lot of themed albums. I find it easier (and quicker) to just keep them all together in our yearly album.
I’d love to hear how you store, label or decorate your albums! Feel free to share in the comments below.
Have a creative day!
Sherry
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