The One with Nadja's Book

I love making books :) Especially now that I finally don't need to look at the instructions anymore. Only took like 8 years to memorize them, ha! Anyway, my friend Nadja found some vintage photos of her mother and wants to put them in a special place. How 'bout a handmade book?!

I perused through my scrapbook supplies for the perfect vintage papers and found the Reflections collection by Echo Park. I brought the papers to church a few Sundays ago and got Nadja's approval :)

Yesterday I made her book!

My dad cut and mailed me a whole bunch of wood covers awhile back - my favorite cover material.

The finished size is 5x7 so it'll fit common 4x6 pictures and anything smaller, up to 5x7. I used my favorite type of binding: coptic. If you can poke/punch/drill holes through it, it can be sewn into a book.

I used aqua for the first 5 signatures (groups of papers) and blue for the other 5 signatures for a total of 10 signatures.
I used all of the patterned papers in the Reflections collection as wells as coordinating cardstock (American Crafts brand of course!) and regular printer paper.

As a fun touch I sewed little charms and bedazzles into the binding.

I thought about maybe painting flowers on the front, but didn't want to risk messing it up. I should have painted before the book was made - note to self for next time.

From start to finish this book took about 2 hours to make.

It makes fun little noises when the charms move around :)

I hope Nadja likes it and enjoys using it for her family photos for future posterity to look through and reminisce!