Micro Album ‘Fresh & Bright’

As you may have noticed by now I love to collect older paper collections that are difficult to come by. Lush by Kaisercraft  is one such design paper collection, stemming from 2010!

I used this lovely paper to create a micro album, following the design of my very first micro pretty much literally in order to write a tutorial for you all.

So have fun watching the show & tell video and Go Create! 🙂

 

Four-fold Photo Board “Baby’s First Year” (+ 2 cards)

Hello all!

Today I’m sharing with you a new design, that I’ve dubbed a four-fold photo board! To celebrate the birth of her niece’s baby girl, my mother asked me to create something special and this is what I came up with.

This photo board combines the concepts of a gameboard-like, easy to stow away photo keepsake and an elaborate quadruple layout piece to showcase your photos and memorabilia in one great overview. This could be a great conversation piece at your table 🙂

It’s perfect for housing one year of pictures, for it is aimed at showcasing twelve picture highlights, one for each month. Hence the theme I chose: Baby’s First Year. There is room for some extra photos though.

The four-fold photo board would also be perfect for many other themes! I can picture a family’s history, adding a family tree to one quarter of the board, and using the other three for pictures of your father, your mother and your children (or yourself). Other themes that I could see fitting this design very well: the four seasons, baby-to-bride, puppy to senior dog (or other pet), modelling portfolio, career highlights, holidays, travel, etc. Gosh, so many ideas now I think of it! 🙂

There’s a tutorial waiting for you in my Etsy shop 🙂 . There are also some kits available: Bundle of Joy Boy by Echo Park, which is the boy version of my own project, and Heirloom by Kaisercraft, which has an ancestry theme. You can find them in my Kits section.

Anyway, it was great fun to create this project – I even created two cards from the leftover papers – and I hope you’ll enjoy it too! 🙂

 

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Rose of Encouragement – An Interactive Wallet Card

If you want to try your hand at this interactive wallet card yourself, please check out the tutorial I wrote for you, which you can find in my Etsy shop.

NEWS flash: this tutorial is now also available in Dutch – email me if you’re interested! Plus, several card kits to make this particular card are now available as well! 🙂


Recently Jessica, a young lady from the USA whom I had never met before, contacted me via Youtube, proposing a project swap. I loved this idea, as well as the great spontaneity she showed with this initiative, and we agreed to a friendly card challenge. I set the theme, she added some parameters. So here’s the homework we gave ourselves:

Create an interactive, not too bulky wallet-type card around the theme Encouragement. The projects would have to be true to our individual styles and personalities. Extra criterium was to try and make the message to the other person as personal as we could – without us actually knowing eachother… So we’d have to find our inner Encourager, as it were. 🙂

So, in the video below you can check out what I came up with! This wallet card measures 5.75 x 5.75″ (14.5 x 14.5 cm) and is of my own design. It has pockets, tags, layered layouts and several interactive closures. It’s perfect for more than one sentiment and personalized message, it can function as a gift card holder and it will come in very handy as a vehicle for a group gift – when there are several personal messages by different people and/or gift cards needing to be tucked away into one awesome card 🙂

I used Kaisercraft’s Lady Rose collection, which is stunningly beautiful, feminine and timelessly on trend. Plus, it has some great and encouraging sentiment labels which fit this challenge perfectly!

And here’s the video of the card Jessica created for me! So thank you again Jessica, for your lovely card and your great initiative – an encouragement in and of itself! And for those of you who’d like to see what Jessica’s up to, check out her website, which you can find at AT2 Design.

 

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Mini Album “2Die4” – an idea to store your dies

I haven’t been die-cutting from the beginning of my scrapbooking adventures (back in November 2012), but ever since I’ve been trying my hand at it, my stash of dies seems to keep growing no matter what I do… It didn’t take too long before I was in need of a handy and practical way to store my dies, preferably without having to save all the packaging.

I figured: why not create a mini album with magnetic pages to hold all of them!

So I got to work, stumbling along while experimenting, encountering several impediments and difficulties. I finished the project nevertheless, although the end result is not the most esthetically pleasing of projects.

I’m sharing this with you anyway, for now you can all learn from my mistakes, apply my tips and create your own very practical and no doubt far more pretty storage minis! 🙂

Have fun, and let me know what you think!

A Natural History Adventure Ultra Mini Album


Hello, and welcome to part 2 of September Mini Album Month on my blog! (which simply means I’ll upload a mini album video every Sunday, instead of the usual once a month). We started off Mini Album Month with a sweet baby girl mini – if you’ve missed it, you might wanna catch up 😉

This week it’s all about the ultra mini album I created for the son of my colleague & friend, who would be turning ten soon and his mother wanted him to have his very own 10-year-old’s-mini. She told me that of all the things he liked, he loved animals, nature, sea shells, and Minecraft the most. A fun challenge for me, for I had to imagine myself a little boy and try to answer the question: what kind of mini would I like?

I came up with an album that fit the ultra mini album category, by which I mean a type of album that sits right between the regular mini album and the micro album, both in size and complexity. Bo Bunny’s Trail Mix collection perfectly fit the natural history theme I had in mind.
By the way, I’ve shown you an ultra mini album some blog posts ago, so check it out for a Flora & Fauna-themed one.

For your convenience I included tutorials for the basic construction of the pages of this mini, so stay tuned for those in the second half of the video.

Last but not least: during the page tutorial I mention the magnet closure and ribbon pull fairly briefly, based on the assumption that you guys already know how to create those. If you don’t, however, I recommend one of my earlier tutorials, where I go over them step by step.

Have fun and let me know what you think!

 

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A Rose Garden Trio of Birthday Cards

Here’s three different cards created from one paper stack: Rose Garden by First Edition. All three designs are my own; it was great fun to come up with them and create them. The Rose Garden paper is truly lovely, very feminine and romantic. Very suitable for my aunt and my cousin, who have their birthdays in August.

The designs are very stylish, their contruction kept lean and with very little embellishments. It’s my way of allowing the beauty of the paper to speak for itself.

There’ll be a tutorial of the third card in one of my upcoming September projects (Natural History Adventure Ultra Mini Album), where it’ll be a mini album page design. But it works as a card just as well! So stay tuned if you want to learn how to make one… 😉

Anyway, here’s the video – hope you feel inspired by these cards 🙂

Please like & subscribe! 🙂

 

New Micro Album design: The Briefcase

This is a cute, unique design, which I’m very proud of! It’s a different kind of micro album, which I designed as sort of a briefcase. Also: very fun to create!

Paper is Bohemian Bazaar by Graphic 45, a great paper that I’ve used before – on one of my mini albums and also on a cute gatefold card. I’ve used the last of the scraps that I had left over of these projects to create this micro album. What a great way to use up all of your paper 🙂

 

Click for my other micro albums!

 

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A cute little all occasions photo booklet

This little booklet is a cute alternative for a card: you can add little tags to write a personal message, and even add some photos or other nice pictures. So, Happy Birthday, or Happy Any Other Occasion! 🙂 It’s also a great alternative for using your scraps – next to, for instance, making scrap mats or other kinds of scrap decorations.

Of course you can make your own little booklet quite easily, feel free to come and get some inspiration from my tutorial for mini booklets if you’ve never made one yourself.

Anyway, here’s the video – P.S.: don’t forget to hit the like button underneath it! 😉

DCWV - Serenity 4

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Tutorial: How to make a double circle paper closure

Lately I’ve gotten some requests to do more tutorials, which was very encouraging and which inspired me to share this design with you all.

For an interactive element in my Little Miss mini album I designed a special paper closure, that I’m calling Double Circle Closure. In this video I’m using design paper from DCWV’s Immortal Love stack, which would also make it a great Valentine’s Day card or interactive element in your Valentine’s Day mini album – just a tip…;-).

It may take a bit of practice, especially since I’m eyeballing the whole thing so I can’t give you any measurements, but I hope you’ll get the idea. I apologize in advance for the lighting, since I filmed at night and didn’t have a so-called “daylight lamp” or any other kind of photo lamp. Anyway, if you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to ask, simply use the comment section below. I usually answer within 24 hours.

By the way, feel free to use my design on any of your projects. Whenever you decide to share these on your blog, Youtube, Facebook or any other website or medium, please do mention my name (Katja), the name of my blog (Creator’s Image Studio) and please share the link to this blog. Thank you!

Note on video quality: Most of my videos are 720p; the rest is 540p. If you’re not able to get 720p or 540p  while viewing the video on this blog but instead have to make due with some rather unsharp videos, you should be able to adjust video quality by clicking the gear icon in the bottom right corner of the video player, and selecting your preferred quality. If you don’t have the gear icon, then click the Youtube sign, also in the bottom right corner of the video player. This will take you directly to Youtube, where you’ll be able to change the video quality with the gear icon after all. Hope this helps.

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Super-sized birthday card

Having done several mini and micro cards & booklets, I figured it was time to go in another direction and create a super-sized card! 🙂 It’s a Happy Birthday card, created with DCWV’s Serenity paper and measuring 17×25 cm (approx. 7×10 inches). It has three pockets, which hold two photo mats plus an “actual” birthday card – from a local store. Of course I used my scrap mat technique as well, on the front pocket.

Enjoy the video!

Have you ever created a super-sized card or other project? Please tell me all about it in the comment section below! 🙂

Don’t forget to like & subscribe, so you won’t miss future projects 😉

DCWV - Serenity 4

Cute birthday booklet

Although at the moment designing and creating mini albums, cards and altered objects are my main focus when it comes to paper crafting, I really like the occasional mini (or even micro) booklet as well. This one for instance, with its 1 5/8 x 2 1/4 inches (4,3×5,7 cm) is the tiniest I’ve created yet. And it still has pockets & tags! 🙂

I used Madeline design paper by Prima Marketing, the same as with my Madeline cinch mini. This would also make it a great companion piece to this mini, for instance as an alternative birthday card.

So please enjoy the two-minute video!

 

By the way, in the video I refer to my Bohemian Bazaar mini booklet – which you van check out in more detail in my blogpost on the Bohemian Bazaar mini album.

Want to create your own micro booklet? Then check out my tutorial on this blog!

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How to create a scrap mat – a tutorial

Here’s a little tutorial on how I make so-called ‘scrap mats’. This is what I call the photo mats that I create from leftover scraps of design paper.

You see the thing is, I just like to use up as much of my design paper as I can – I guess it’s a combination of enjoying as much of a particular paper stack as possible on the one hand, and frugality on the other. I mean, you’d be surprised how much photo mat real-estate the right combination of scraps generates! (What can I say, I’m just weird that way 😉 )

Meanwhile, the results have been quite cool, imho. So check it out and find out how to create these mats yourself!

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