Monday 6 December 2021

The Most Beautiful Things - shaped harmonica album

Agnieszka has a lot of different shaped albums available in the shop and amongst the most recent additions are wonderful chipboard bases which come a large range of non typical album shapes. I wonderful if any of you have looked at them and wondered how on earth to put them together as the sets do not have a spine. I shared how to make the house shaped album recently and used book rings to join the pages together and for this post I am using the window shape and joining the pieces using an accordion approach. But before you join the pieces together it is wise to draw around the shape onto the papers so that you have one patterned paper piece for each side of the chipboard pieces. I chose to work with Snowy Winterland 12 x 12 papers as I think these papers are not overtly Christmassy so the album can be used for a number of different occassions.

Once you have all of the papers cut then its time to join the bare chipboard pieces together - I cut 2" strips of white card the length of the straight part of the window sides and scored these at 1" along the short edge. I then adhered the pages alternating the strips of paper one to the back, one to the front, one to the back and so on as this makes it easier for the pages to be folded into mountain and valley folds.


Once the pages were together I then covered them with the pre cut papers trimming them carefully if needed so that they fitted neatly. Before adding the window front I secured a piece of co-ordinating shabby ribbon in place with a short length to the right and a long length to the left - the left hand piece wraps around the back of the folded album and ties to keep the album closed.


Once the construction was done it was then a case of decorating all of the pages. I worked by fussy cutting elements from the Junk Journal Extras and set of extras and then created photo mats 4" x 53/4" using white cardstock adding detail with a christmas floral stamp. I chose to work with weathered wood ink and distressed the edges of all my my elements with this ink so that the whole album has a cohesive feel.

For the front cover I layered paper elements with a piece of cheesecloth and tucked in pieces of chipboard from the twigs 1 set. Once the main cluster was in place I cut out my sentiment from inscriptions paper and added it to the album. I also added some graphite gilly flowers to which some artic ice paste had been added for a little sparkle.

The pages inside are all decorated in a fairly similar format - some with torn scraps of paper to create pockets and others with flaps created by folding elements from the junk journals extra pack. Onto each page clusters of fussy cut elements have also been added.

The first page is a pocket page using a torn corner of paper to create the pocket by adhering on two sides. The companion page was created by adhering the photomat on three sides creating a pocket into which a folded paper piece was tucked leaving one side projecting over the photomat.

For the next page I chose just to add an embellishment cluster to the side of the photomat and its companion page has a torn pocket added with additional paper element tucked in.

The next duo of pages consists of a photomat adhered on three sides with folded piece of paper tucked in to create a flap - be creating the flap in this way there are then 3 surfaces to which additional photos or journalling can be added. The companion page has a simple embellishment cluster as its decoration.

 On the opposite side of the album the pages are a pocket page and embellishment cluster.


The final two pages have a tucked in folded paper element and another pocket page. 

I do hope you like this tutorial and have a try at using some of the shaped album chipboards that are in the shop. I have used winter themed papers for this make which means that it would work was a Christmas album, an album to celebrate a special winter birthday or may be one to record a winter holiday which means that the papers chosen have a lot of versatility.













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