How To Make A Teeny Tiny Photo Album

This diddly little photo album makes a great present - I made one for Andre for our first wedding anniversary (paper). It's about the size of a credit card so it's easy to carry around in your pocket.

The first thing you need to do is decide how big you want the album to be, and how many pages you want to have. You'll then need to get busy in Photoshop and re-size however many pictures would be required to fit your chosen number of pages. I re-sized a bunch of photos to 5cm x 8cm, put them all on one image in a grid, had the image printed off from the local printer at 12" x 8" and then cut the pictures into individual images.

Next up, you'll need a few rectangles of art paper (hand-torn to size looks great) which have been folded down the middle to create pages that are the right size to hold your photos with a small border. You'll also need something to act as the cover for the album. I used stiff woven paper from Paperchase, but you could also use leather, or cardboard, or fabric - whatever you feel like. Finally, you'll need some glue, plus a needle and thread.

Sew your pages together (not the cover at this stage) using a simple running stitch to create a little book. I would suggest leaving a long piece of thread at the end for attaching the pages to the cover.

Carefully sew through from the pages to the cover, pulling tightly. Finish off with a knot, and then run the thread through to the middle of the book to disguise the end.

Stick in your photos:

And tie the album together with a piece of ribbon or twine.

Cute, eh?

Have you done anything creative with your photos recently? Do tell :-)

Wedding Week - Stationery

Hurrah for more wedding loveliness! Today I'm going to share all the stationery that I made (yes, MADE I tell you) with my own two hands - invitations, menus, escort cards, seating plans, and so on. Let's just say a lot of Pritt-Stick was involved, plus a plethora of paper cuts, and some fairly frequent cursing. It all turned out splendidly though, so totally worth the effort. My big tip for anyone who is bonkers enough to consider making their own wedding stationery is that everything takes about five times as long as you think it's going to, so get everything done well in advance in order to avoid ending up gluing confetti cones at 2am. Ahem.

My first task was to find the perfect paper. It had to be the right shade of ivory, the right weight, and the right texture. "Um, those samples all look the same," said my future husband. Poor man - the sample on the right was at least 20 gsm heavier than the one on the left. Men, eh. After much reasearch I ordered the ivory card and envelopes from a company called Daintree Paper (who I have just discovered are no longer trading), and bought the brown papers (plain and patterned) from Paperchase.

I went for a square centre-fold option, with two layered bands, plus ivory ribbon:

I also decided to draw a wedding map showing all the key locations (the church, our house, various Didsbury landmarks), which we enclosed with the invitations:

I created this map by driving to all the places, taking photos of them, doing a normal size drawing of them with black ink, scanning the picture in, shrinking it, and then using Photoshop to place each separate house onto a road map that I had also drawn separately and scanned in. This meant that I could have a lot of detail for each house, down to individual roof tiles, without trying to achieve this in a tiny drawing:

I then printed the maps onto the same paper as the invitations - and because I'd scanned the drawings at a high resolution, it preserved the actual pen marks (where I had coloured in the windows, for example) so each map came out looking as if it had been hand-drawn individually rather than printed.

I also made drink menus (which I fastened to wooden skewers and stuck into individual pots of herbs):

Name tags (fastened with ribbon onto bars of organic chocolate - and yes, Batman came to our wedding):

A table plan - an aerial drawing of our garden (we held the reception at home) which I placed in a wooden frame and hung from the door of the garden shed (yep, we were probably the only wedding in history for feature a garden shed as a prominent design element - more to come tomorrow!):

A menu - written in gold pen on an ivory-framed mirror:

And escort cards:

The idea behind these cards is that all our guests located their card by name - and on the back of the card found a picture of one of four flowers (agapanthus, olive, chrysanthemum and eucalyptus - all part of our wedding flowers) which corresponded to the order in which we wanted people to go up the Italian deli buffet table and pile their plates high. So the people with agapanthus cards were called first, followed by eucalyptus, and so on:

And then we went on our honeymoon and I slept for about 48 hours straight in sheer exhaustion from all that cutting and gluing.

Coming up tomorrow - decorating the marquee (and finding a team of Polish marquee providers who were prepared to put a marquee over our entire garden - suckers!)...

Paper, Hessian, Lace And Net - Christmas Gift Wrapping, Nest-Style

As I mentioned yesterday, I have a three-week holiday over Christmas this year. Liking it. This means that I have had time to take the dogs for long walks in the snow every day, make all my Christmas cards by hand, cook elaborate three course dinners (asparagus and hollondaise sauce, lobster thermidor, chocolate mousse) - and of course, spend hours and hours and hours wrapping all our Christmas presents.

I choose a different colour scheme for my Christmas-present wrapping every year. One year it may be scarlet and olive. Another year - different shades of turquoise. This year I have been inspired by these brown paper, doily and twine creations from Leslie on Decor8:    

And also by these adorable fabric, hessian and lace confections from Grey Likes Weddings via Style Me Pretty:

Yes. This year my Christmas presents have been wrapped in brown paper, linen, lace, net and twine. And they look pretty cute, too.

Here are the materials I used:

The fabric I already had lying around the house. The cappuccino-coloured linen is a remnant from when I made the living room curtains. The white muslin is from a roll I bought to decorate our wedding marquee. And I had a few pieces of spare French lace left over from when my wedding dress was made.

Here's how the gifts turned out:

The adorable pottery hearts are made by Elizabeth Prince - you may have seen them a few days ago on this post.

Wrapping presents in a very elaborate manner is like cooking complicated meals. It takes hours to prepare - and then the whole thing is over in about 15 minutes. But I love doing both, what can I say :-)

We're leaving Manchester in about an hour to drive across the Pennines to my parents' house in Yorkshire - where three days of Scrabble tournaments, homemade food, and country walks await us. Happy Christmas, everyone!