Articles : Tutorials - Hybrid

Making an accordion gift album with digital pages

(or, "how I got out of buying a birthday present.")

My friend Jen has 5 kids. Her twins' birthday was coming up, and I asked her what I should get for them. "Oh, don't buy them toys," she told me. "Just take pictures at the party and make me a scrapbook page."

Music to my ears! Shopping for other people's kids is SO hard, and I was planning on taking lots of pictures anyway.

Before the party even started, I knew what I was going to make with the party pictures: a 12 picture 5x5 accordion album. Jen has backyard water parties at her parents' house (which may be Jake's only chance during childhood to experience a slip-n-slide), so in addition to the typical action shots, my goal was to get a close-up shot of each child at the party.

I designed the album to also be a display piece -- so all the close-up pictures of Jen's kids are one one side, and the party guest pictures are on the other. By using one brightly colored digital kit (Dani Mogstad's "Rockstar,") I was able to make the album interesting and fun, and tie all the pictures together.

The day after the party I opened up a 4.75x4.75 Photoshop document. (This album, like the board book I wrote about last time, is listed as 5x5 -- but after measuring I decided the photo pages needed to be a bit smaller.) With the rulers showing, I placed guidelines to create an inner square 1/8 of an inch in from all sides. (See image below.) I used this template for each page -- the photo fills the inner box, then a patterned paper is slipped in behind the photo to fill the 1/8 border with a splash of color. To make the photos "pop," I added a white border with "Edit > Stroke" of 5 pixels.

 

Since there were 9 kids total at the party and the album needed a title page, that only left me 2 pages for action shots. I used 4 pictures for each page, separating the photos with digital stitching. I'll give Jen a disk of the party pictures, so if she wants to print some of the action shots, she can -- for me, this album's priority was the close-up shots.

(To read about getting the images ready for printing, read my previous article, Learning My Numbers.  Look for the paragraph that begins "Preparing the prints was easy.")

Putting together an according album takes careful planning: if you're not careful, you'll run out of space or put pictures in the wrong order. (Or tape the pictures down before you realize they're supposed to have ribbon already secured underneath. Not that I've ever done that . . . Ok, I have. Multiple times.) The very first decision to make is which page of the album the ribbons will be attached to. As you can see in the picture, both ribbons are attached to the same page (most any craft glue or tape will hold -- just allow plenty of time to dry before attaching a photo over it.) The ribbon on the left will go behind and around the album to meet the ribbon at the right, so obviously it needs to be longer. To know which page to attach the ribbons to: if you're looking at the folded-up accordion album like a book, it's the page that would be the cover. Mark that page and save the ribbon attaching for last.

Before attaching any photos, I laid out all my pictures on the table in the order I wanted them. After some double-checking that they were in the right order and they would line up correctly with the album, I used double-sided tape on ALL sides of each photo to attach them.

BONUS: After I had the album completed, I realized I had an easy short cut for a scrapbook page for my own album. I used all the album pages with a neutral background on one 8.5x11 layout, and used 15 additional pictures in rows on a second page with strips of patterned paper to separate them.

About the author ...
Jen Strange is mama to Jake, a full-time secretary, part-time piano teacher, and obsessive scrapbooker (since her son's birth in 2002.) An avid blogger since 2004, her DigiScrappin' with Jen blog serves as an introduction to digital scrapbooking, while her Stop Piracy blog is a centralized spot for learning about and fighting the piracy of digital scrapbook kits and designs. Jen has been digitally scrapbooking since April 2005; find Jen at www.jenstrange.com and Layouts by the Numbers

Submitted by strangejen