Cuttlebug Creatively Yours Spotlight Sunday - Acrylic Tri-Fold Album

Hello everyone and welcome to this weeks Cuttlebug Challenges, Creatively Yours Spotlight Sunday. This is Mrs J here and I'd like to share with you a tutorial on how I made this vintage style embossed acrylic album.

For this project you will need the following:

• A Cuttlebug or Big Shot
• An acrylic album that will fit through a Cuttlebug or Big Shot (this one is by Papermania)
• Cuttlebug Textile Embossing Folder
• Cuttlebug Love Language Folder
• Cuttlebug Asterisks Dies
• Sandpaper
• Crop-A-Dile
• Small sharp scissors
• Cardboard
• Brown chalk ink
• An old paperback book (that you don't mind cutting up)
• Double sided tape
• Diamond Glaze
• Glue stick
• Double sided punch tape
• Buttons
• Cotton lace
• Hot fix flat back pearls
• MM tiny alpha stickers - brown ledger
• Paper roses in cream and terracotta
• Large chipboard letters
• Chipboard flourish
• Felt
• Embroidery floss
• Copper craft wire

Quite a long and extensive list there but for this album I wanted to make as many of the embellishments as I could myself.

Okay, to start! First of all remove the protective cover that comes on your acrylic album.

Now it's on to the fun part of embossing each page. Place the Cuttlebug Textile embossing folder over as much of the page as you can and place in your Big Shot (or Cuttlebug) sandwich. I used a Big Shot so for this I used the multipurpose platform with no tabs, a cutting plate, the page and folder then the final cutting plate.

Now carefully run this through the Big Shot. It is quite hard work!

This is how your acrylic page will look after the first pass. Now re-position your Embossing folder over the unembossed part of the page and pass through the Big Shot again.

One fully embossed page! The beauty of using a folder such as Textile on a project like this is that you don't have to worry about matching up the pattern. As you can see from the photograph above it doesn't look odd or unmatched! Now repeat this process on the other 2 pages.

To highlight the embossing even more, gently sand the surface of each page to dull the embossed edges.

This really makes a difference don't you think?

Next, as the album is not being put together in the traditional way (2 book rings on one side of the album so that it opens like a book) an additional hole needs to be put into what will be the middle page.

A Crop-A-Dile make light work of acrylic!

Because I wanted the album to have a vintage feel to it I rubbed over the raised surface of each page with a brown chalk ink pad. Because the surface had been sanded beforehand this provides a 'key' for the ink to adhere too, so although this is an acrylic album you don't have to use a special solvent ink for it to stay on. Apply liberally then then wipe off the excess with a soft cloth or tissue.

This just gives the page a soft, warmer tone, almost like sepia.

Sorry about the quality of the above picture, but hopefully you get the idea of how it looks once the page has been inked.

Now it's on to embellishing each page. As I mentioned earlier I wanted to make most of the decoration myself so I pulled together the materials shown below and started playing!

An important part to an album like this is obviously the photographs! The pictures I selected were first changed to sepia (in Picasa), then printed onto 4"x6" gloss paper, 4 to a page so that their final size is 2"x3". Each photograph was then matted onto a paper from the book and the edges were then distressed with the edge of my scissors and lightly inked with the brown chalk ink.

My album is dedicated to my dear Mum, to highlight how strong her love was and how much I miss her. Using three pages in the album I wanted to spell out 'Mum' over the pages but within that incorporate some extra words.

'A Mother's love is Unconditional & Monumental'

'I Miss you & love yoU so much Mum'

So that you can see in a little more detail how each page is made up I have photographed them individually.

The flourish on the page above was traced from a chipboard piece, covered on each side with paper from the paperback book then carefully cut out with a small pair of scissors and finally inked around the edges. This has actually been stuck down on the reverse side of the page with Diamond Glaze, but is still part of the detail here, highlighted with the hot fix flat back pearls. For my chipboard letters I only had 1 'M' and 1 'U' so before using them I traced them onto card. The letter M above was covered in felt before cutting out.

On this page I cut out flowers using the Cuttlebug Asterisks die, some in paper and a couple in felt. To decorate I used flat back pearls for the centers of the smaller flowers and made a felt circle and used buttons for the larger ones.

Another flourish was cut for this page and simply coloured using the brown chalk ink.

This is the reverse side of the page above. See how the flourish works for both sides with a bot of careful positioning and clear glue.

Here I covered a piece of card with double sided punch tape and then some felt before cutting out the 'love you' from the Cuttlebug Love Language folder. This makes it far easier to adhere the words to the page.

On this last page I twisted the stems together of some paper rosebuds before adding some copper wire flourishes, also twisted around the stem.

To fasten the three pages together hopefully you've spotted that I used some wider cotton lace, slotted through the holes and tied in a bow.

With some very careful planning before sticking anything down on a page, you can get some very effective results that work for both sides of the page.

I hope that this tutorial will inspire you to try an embossed acrylic album of your own, as I hope you will agree with me, they make for a truly beautiful keepsake. We would love to see any creations that you do make so please leave us a comment with a link to your blog and we can come and admire your work! Also, please stop by my blog Mrs J's Creations and let me know what you think there.

Thank you for joining me here today and enjoy the rest of your weekend.

And just to let you know that for this weeks Be Inspired Challenge on Wednesday (25th) we have an amazing guest DT, none other than Valerie Salmon of Got Sketch? fame.

She has created a beautiful card sketch for us all to work from and the winner for the week, chosen by Valerie herself, will receive one years free membership to Got Sketch? There's gonna be one very lucky person out there!

And finally (yes, I'm nearly done!), please don't forget to add us to your blog roll, and if you haven't already, please add yourself as a follower - we're getting very close to that magic 500th follower (if we're not already there)!