Off the Rails Scrapbooking: Make Something Useful For Next To Nothing

Making Something Useful For Next to Nothing

Hello, it's Wendy here to show you how I made this guest book for my niece's recent birthday. I chose black, silver and pink because they were the colours of the decorations at her party.

It cost around $4 and scraps from my stash to make this and my niece loved it. First I started with a water colour sketch book.

I chose this because it's acid free, which gives the flexibility to add photos to go along with the guests' autographs and memories. The problem with this book though was that it had a plastic, see through front cover and a brown cardboard back cover. So, I covered the front and back with black card stock.

This is the front cover. A 12x12 piece of black cardstock, cut like this, was a perfect fit. I did this for the back cover too. I glued the flaps to overlap and provide extra strength - effective, but not very pretty. So I covered the inside joins with some glitter patterned cardstock, on the inside of the front and the back covers, to give a nice finish.

Next step, I used Washi tape to decorate both covers, and provide extra strength.

Then I glued two layers of organza ribbon and a layer of glitter tape across the front and back covers like this.

I extended the ribbons so they could be used as a tie to keep the book closed.

Then I started to add the embellishments. Firstly a metal embellishment, topped with a flower, for both the front and the back.

That's the back finished, now for the rest of the embellishments on the front, including a photo of the guest of honour.

My niece loves bling and champagne, so I took my lead from there. I had metal champagne embellishments and bling in my stash .... so no problem. The final bit of decorating was to pretty up the spiral spine. This I did with pieces of ribbon in the black, silver, pink colour palette.