Paper Bag Book Tutorial

Hey ya’ll! It’s Jeni (j_hopewell) here with your Theory Thursday post for the week. I wanted to do something hybrid and since Father’s Day is coming up I decided that should be my theme. I really wanted to try a chipboard album but there are NONE to be found around here. Grrrrrrr. And I didn’t have time to order one online. Grrrrrrr. What to do? Well, I finally decided to use something I had on hand. Little paper bags – like you take your lunch in. I used to make these little mini-albums all the time back when I was a paper scrapper. I love them and they are sooooo easy to make. Here, I’ll show you:

First, you need to gather up your supplies. You’ll need three paper bags, scissors and/or a paper trimmer, a hot glue gun, a ruler, and your scrapped pages that have been printed out. You’ll also need something to punch your holes through the finished book – I used my trusty (and HUGE!) Crop-O-Dile but you can use an eyelet setter too. A regular hole punch probably won’t be able to punch through the doubled up paper bags and the cover. Just make sure that it’s the large eyelet setter hole or the large hole on your Crop-O-Dile. You’ll also need some ribbons to finish the binding.

Lay out your paper bags (you can use brown too!) so that you have one top facing left, one bottom facing left, and another top facing left. Leave the bags flat – you don’t need to open them. Stack them all together.

Fold the bags in half while they’re all together. Can you see how this is shaping up to be your little mini album? You can save yourself a step later on by opening up the fold now and getting out your sewing machine to stitch down the inside fold. This is what I usually do, but I didn’t feel like cleaning off my cluttered scrap table to get out my sewing machine so we’ll just make do without it this time.

Now, open up the album to the center fold and get out your ruler. You need to measure the size of your bag (I’ve found they’re all a little different). You need to leave about 1/2 inch on the inside near the fold where you will punch your holes later. My pages ended up being 5×5. Perfect for using reduced Quick Pages!!! Which brings me to my next step. . .

Scrap!!! I just used some Quick Pages from the {When Daddy Comes Home} kit by GG Digital Designs. I have to give a shout out to my good buddies that made Quick Pages from their own LOs and gave me permission to use them for my book. Thanks Megan and Rhonda (aka my lifesavers!) Their QP’s were 12×12 and I just inserted my pictures and journaling/titles and then reduced the size to 5×5. Perfect!! Don’t forget to make a cover. I made mine 5×12 so that it’s one continuous cover. I printed them all out on matte photo paper just here on my home printer. I love using matte photo paper because then they look like cardstock and match better with my real paper scrapped albums.

Next, trim your pages. You can also use your scissors if you don’t have a paper cutter. This way is just much faster.

After you’ve got everything trimmed, you can start figuring out where you want your pages to be in the album. I go ahead and stick them right in the book and keep them in their place until I’m ready to glue. You’ll also want to get your cover folded. Using the paper bag album as your guide as to where the fold should be go ahead and fold and crease your cover. It may or may not be exactly folded in half depending on how you decorated your cover. Mine wasn’t exactly in half and I knew I would have to trim some of it off. I wanted to make sure I trimmed off the back and not the front.

This step is completely optional. If you don’t want the rough edges from the top of the paper bags to show then go ahead and trim them off before you start gluing.

Get out your glue gun and start gluing!!! I add glue to the paper bag and not my printout – that way you don’t get hot glue all over your fingers – OUCH!! I don’t add a ton, I usually just draw a square around the edges (not too close) and then a circle in the middle. Don’t forget to keep away 1/2 inch from the inside edge (fold.) Gluing your pages on in order helps keep them in order too.

Add some glue to the inside of the tops of the bags to keep them closed. . . UNLESS you have a bunch of pages you want to put in this album. Then, this is the perfect little pocket for a double sided LO! I usually do this, I just didn’t have enough time (or Quick Pages!) to do it this time.

After your pages are all glued in you can glue on your cover. Start with the front (staying away from the folded edge) and then do the back. Trim off any extra paper from the cover if you have any.

Since I was lazy and didn’t get out my sewing machine I have to do another step now. I added a LITTLE bit of adhesive (not the glue gun – just a tape-like adhesive) to the inside fold of the album to help keep all the page folds where they’re supposed to be when I punch the holes.

Get out your Crop-O-Dile or eyelet setters and punch holes in the edge of the book about 1/4 inch up from the fold. I only punched three but you can do more if you want. The Crop-O-Dile makes this SOOOOOOO easy. It was like I was punching through 1 sheet of typing paper and not the whole book. The eyelet setter works great too – just takes some more effort and lots of pounding!

Yay! The fun part – picking out ribbons! I’m so addicted to ribbons – I love them! I picked out a good mix of sizes and styles and colors. I’ll tie 3-4 ribbons in each hole next to each other – not one on top of the other. I only tie them once, since a double knot is too bulky. They have always stayed in place without a problem.

Just trim your ribbon edges now and . . .

that’s it!!! You’re finished! I hope I explained all of this well enough for you guys to understand it, if not please feel free to PM me with any questions! Sorry for the blurry pictures but it’s not easy to hot glue with one hand and take a picture of it with the other! LOL! Hope you guys have a great week and a Happy Father’s Day! Don’t forget to unplug your glue guns. . . until next time! : )

This entry was posted on Thursday, June 12th, 2008 at 4:52 am and is filed under Hybrid Scrapping, Tutorials, tHeory tHursday. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.