30th birthday scrapbooks

For my best friends'30th birthdays I wanted to give them something special. After getting into card making and buying Creativity magazine, I realised that scrapbooking could be a fun extension of my hobby and a good way to create a more personal present. I decided to put together a little album of photos and memories from the almost two decades we had known each other. My friends have kindly given me permission to put these photos on my blog.

I bought a blank cardboard ringbound album from Ebay, which I think was 10x8 inches - plenty big enough for a photo plus some embellishments per page. I really liked the front cover, below. I covered the cardboard cover with purple paper, used cardboard letters to spell out my friend's name and added two types of butterfly embellishments- die-cuts and rather fancier 3D ones. I also put two pieces of sticky ribbon along the bottom.


Inside the album I included a selection of photos going right back to our school days. I'm not going to put them all up here, but here are a few examples. In this one below, I used a selection of girl friend-related transfer words but allowed the photo to be the focus of the page.

Not every page contained a photo. Here I made a pocket by cutting a piece of card diagonally so it would take up half the scrapbook page and stuck it along the bottom two edges to make a pocket. I covered both the page underneath and the pocket with the same patterned paper. I edged the pocket with sticky ribbon and made a gift tag to slip inside. It says "I like bees" as my friend had just taken up bee-keeping and at the time, her entire "about me" section on Facebook said "I like bees"!

I was very excited to be able to include a picture of my friend's baby in the album. For this page I chose a pink patterned background, stuck on a selection of buttons that I bought on Ebay, and used my X-Cut die-cutting machine (which was quite expensive - about £40 - but came with a bunch of stencils including alphabet letters, which I have used quite a lot) to make the words "cute as a button". She really is!

This is the back cover of the album, covered in the same paper as the front with lots of die-cut butterflies in different pastel shades. I also have several sheets of "handmade by Caroline" stickers that I ordered via Ebay. I think my friend was really pleased with her gift!