Have a "Hoppy" Easter!

With Easter quickly approaching, we thought you might have fun with our free, new printable cootie catcher - and you'll find it only here!

Click here to download your own cootie catcher in a print-ready PDF format. Instructions are included. This cootie catcher will be available for free download until April 30, 2020. [Edited: We're sorry, but the cootie catcher is no longer available for free download.]

Please abide by our terms of use that are within the document and enjoy this fun fortune-telling game with the children in your life.

Easter ephemera for your crafts

While you're here, take a look at some of our Easter-themed printable ephemera available at KB and Friends' Etsy Shop.

Valentine's Day Albums from Priscilla Circelli-Gibbs

Even though Valentine's Day has already passed, we couldn't help but show off some Valentine's Day journals made by Priscilla Circelli-Gibbs.

They are exquisite, and she sells some of them directly from her Instagram page.

Naturally, we at KB and Friends are tickled pink that she uses some of our printable Valentine's Day ephemera to create her albums.

This first piece of art is an exquisite "paper bag" journal whose cover shines with a well-placed gold heart embellishment, a butterfly and a bingo card. Visit Priscilla's Instagram page to see the inside. It is packed with retro goodness.

These next two journals are among my all-time favorites. They feature "book covers" by KB and Friends and, like the first journal, are packed with fun, retro Valentine's Day ephemera. We made this set of book covers large enough to be used as actual covers, but the covers also come in a smaller size for those who want to use them as cards.

Thank you, again, to Priscilla for such inspiration!

Make a Valentine's Day Album that looks like a Children's Book

We love mini scrapbook albums that use children's books as the cover. But when you don't have the right book on hand, you can make one using KB and Friend's Valentine's Day book covers!

For the mini album above, we used printables from KB and Friends' Etsy shop, and the rest of the embellishments were from our stash of scrapbook stuff.

We started with our printable retro children Valentine's Day books covers.

We chose the book cover with the title "We 'auto' be together," featuring an adorable boy and girl in a red convertible. We printed the front and back covers, then used spray adhesive to glue them to 5" by 7" chipboard.

The inside pages were also adhered to 5" by 7" chipboard. We used store-bought papers to cover some of the pages. For others, such as the bingo card page, we used printables from KB and Friends.

Before embellishing the book pages, we used our Zutter Bind-it-All to create the wire binding.

The fun part was decorating the book. We used a mix of our own printable Valentine's Day embellishments along with store-bought embellishments that we already had.

Make sure you check out the vintage shaker full of mini retro Valentines. The shaker is attached to the inside cover page using a metal binder clip.

Here is the finished product:

We hope this inspires you to make your own mini album using KB and Friends' book covers and retro ephemera.

There's still time left for Valentine's Day crafting!

With just a few more days left until Valentine's Day, we knew we had to show you these absolutely adorable mini albums made by crafter extraordinaire Stephanie Jordan.

We're pleased as punch to see how she utilized our Valentine's Day printable graphics.

Stephanie says that she turned our Valentine's Day boxes into album covers, and they are so yummy too look at.

Here are the printable boxes that she used from KB and Friends:

We love how Stephanie cut out a window in the box tops so that you can see through to the embellishments inside. It's a tantalizing little peek into each album that makes you more than ever want to open it.

So if Stephanie's album covers weren't enough candy for your eyes, here's a look at the sweet inside: 

Oh, the adorable pockets and pages filled with retro ephemera from KB and Friends! We're so happy when our work is used in such creative ways.

Stephanie used these Valentine's Day kits full of printable ephemera:

So if you're a last-minute crafter, we hope that Stephanie's journals have inspired you to get going! It's easy. And with our printable graphics, you don't even have to leave your house to make a fabulous Valentine's Day album. Thank you to Stephanie for sharing her eye-catching albums.

Inspiring Junk Journals from Luci and Loley

This week's inspiration comes from Gina Gilliam, who turns trash into treasure by making junk journals. She sells them at Luci and Loley. 

For those of you who are new to junk journals, they are handmade scrapbooks made up of reused vintage paper items such as a greeting cards, receipts, textbook pages, flashcards and other ephemera like that sold at KB and Friends. 

Gina is a KB and Friends' customer who combines our printable ephemera with odds and ends that she has collected to create an eclectic and eye-catching look to her works of art. 

Below are pages from a junk journal that she created using our newest cooking-themed, retro kitchen graphics. This kind of two-ringed, tabbed journal would make the perfect holder for recipe cards. The guest check, tickets and milk carton top are really fun embellishments that help give this journal a dose of nostalgia.

Here are the KB and Friends' products that she used for the kitchen-themed journal:

Moving on to more eye candy from Gina, here are some of her other latest and greatest creations. Buy them from  Luci and Loley or get inspired to make your own with printables from KB and Friends.

One fun technique is to use lunch-size paper bags as a base. Paper bags are one of those readily available household objects that give junk journals a truly vintage vibe. That's how Gina created the next three junk journals.

The next two journals feature one of our favorite binding methods: wire binding. You need a special machine, such as a Zutter Bind-it-All, to do this, but, as you can see from Gina's examples, it really gives the junk journals a finished, professional look.

We hope that these junk journals have sparked your imagination! 

More Valentine's Day Love from Cherry's Jubilee Cards

Cherry at Cherry's Jubilee Cards has been especially busy whipping up fabulously delightful Valentine's Day creations using our printable graphics.

So once again, we're sharing Cherry's work here in case you're in the market for a Valentine or you just want a little eye candy to drool over.

These fabulous Valentine's Day cards and decorations use graphics from these kits at KB and Friends:

Forget Watching TV - You Can Now Make One (Using our Printable Retro TV Box)

This is the story of how I came to make this printable box that looks like a retro TV.

A couple of weeks before Christmas, I was in a crafts store, and there, in all its glory, was a decorative, animated TV for the holiday.

I couldn't take my eyes off of it. I wanted it! However, it was a fairly large size, and we simply don't have room to store it 11 months of the year.  So I had to bid it goodbye.

Then,  I realized, I could make a smaller, more simplistic retro TV. Better yet, because my design is in the form of a printable template, I can make one of these retro TVs for every occasion.

Of course, I got busy with the holidays, so I didn't finish up my retro TV diorama until now. Here is my final creation:

I started by printing the retro TV box template (now available to purchase from KB and Friends' Etsy shop). I use a guillotine cutter to cut out the long, straight edges of the box, and, for the angled corners, I just use scissors. I used stick glue to glue the corners of the box together.

The assembled box measures 4.75" wide by 4.5" high by 1.5" deep.

I happened to have some K&Company and Paper Studio scrapbook embellishments on hand. And I cut the colorful gift boxes out from a tag in our Retro Christmas Scrapbook Embellishments kit. The background with the blue sky and snow-covered pine trees was something I already had from an old book.

For a three-dimensional look, I used foam mounting tape to adhere the embellishments to the inside bottom of the box.

The bun feet came from a bag of Fab Lab Crafts wooden candle cups. I tried to stain them using an ink pad that I had on hand, but the brown wasn't the right color so I ended up painting them with acrylic paint.

he hardest thing to make in this project was the rabbit-ears antenna. I finally settled on using a thin dowel, cut down to size, a round wooden piece that I had on hand and two wooden beads for the top. 

I drilled a couple of holes in the round wooden piece. 

Let's just say that getting the E6000 glue to hold the dowels at just the right angle was a challenge. I ended up using silver metallic acrylic paint on the antenna.

Finally, I got out a string of Mayberry Street Miniatures holiday lights that I never used in a previous project and strung them across my retro television.

I am really happy with my new little retro TV. It's something I'm sure to "watch" all of the time.