New Year and New Project

Well, I hope everyone's 2012 is off to a good start! So far my year has been decent. I decided to try a completely new type of project (to me anyway!) for my first project of the new year. I decided to try making a mini album. It ended up turning out better than I thought it was going to. This project really gave me some grief at the beginning stages of it, and I started thinking maybe I should give up on it, but, I stuck with it and it turned out pretty good!

I'm going to go through the step by step process of how it all came together, and pictures of the finished project will be at the end. Hope you enjoy!


First I made my designs with the Gypsy. I chose a rounded square (from the Cricut Essentials cartridge). I set the size at 5.5" x 5.5".

I decided I wanted to add some flare to the cover pages, so I added lettering and welded the letters to the design. I used the Cuttin' Up font cartridge and set the lettering at 1.25"

I then prepared the chipboard for cutting. The chipboard I used was 0.022 thickness. I used my Expression for cutting the chipboard. I ran into a few issues with cutting the chipboard. Here are some tips I found helpful: 1. Tape the chipboard to the mat, but make sure the tape does not overlap on the area that will be cut, I found this causes the blade to lag and the cuts end up coming out wrong. 2. Use the deep cut blade housing and deep cut blade set to blade level 6. 3. For the first cut, set pressure to medium (level 3), speed medium (level 3), and multicut 2. 4. For the second cut, set pressure to high (level 4), speed medium (lever 3), and multicut 2.

Here are my chipboard shapes cut out.

Next, I chose my papers to use. They all came from the same paper stack. I picked this stack up at Hobby Lobby last summer.

Next, I cut out all the cardstock shapes to match the chipboard shapes (same Gypsy file).

Once I had everything cut out, I adhered my paper to the chipboard pieces and I chose my pictures that I wanted to use.

Once I had all my pictures in place, I added various bling to the pages. Blind used : Stickles, hot fix stones, flat back pearls, ribbon. I also cut out various words to add to some of the pages. Of course, all these things are based on your own personal style :)

And here it is, the finished project!

I hope you enjoyed my adventure in mini album making! School will be starting up again in a week, so I don't know how much time I will have to create and post, but I do have some other ideas for "new to me" projects that I would love to share when I get them done! I hope 2012 brings lots of good things to you all. Thanks for stopping by!