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.

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! 

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