Echo Park Love and a Tutorial

Happy Friday! I hope your week has been great! This one will be a long, picture-heavy post! You'll get to see a cute box, a bright card and a mini album including a tutorial. Phew! Why? Because I have a new love! Echo Park Paper. I recently purchased some paper from the Country Drive Collection and love every little inch of it! Let's get started! I should have taken out the light tent because of our gloomy weather, but now it is too late. Tried my best to improve them with Ps. Project no. 1 - cute box:

I have a thing for little boxes and bags! Here I covered a plain white box with patterned paper. To make it look more interesting, I drew lines around the edges using a black marker. To add more dimension to the die-cut flowers, I curled their petals with a simple pencil:

Project no. 2 - bright card:

I love the bee hive pattern on this! And the bee theme reminded me of the Be Happy set from Hero Arts, so I used it here.

Now to project no. 3 - mini album. I've been planning to create lots of mini albums with all the adorable photos of my girl! Finally I made one. More to follow! Here it is:

I took photos of her while we played hide and seek in our garden and she showed the cutest facial expressions. I wanted to create a little album about that:

For the album, I mixed the patterned paper I had and some digital elements that are available here. The inside pages look like this (click to enlarge):

She is such a funny girl :) Now to the tutorial! That mini is made from a single, large, brown paper bag. I thought of ways to use all those paper bags I hoard and came up with this. Here is what it started with:

Beautiful. Ha!

So, first I cut 2 strips of about 4 1/4 " from the bag and ended up with these paper loops. Then I turned them inside out to hide the print. Next I folded them into half and trimmed them the size I wanted (6 " when fold into half). Then I sewed around the edges. Afterwards they looked like this:

Now I layered them:

And sewed through their middle:

Voilà, a recycled, inexpensive mini album base:

Easy, isn't it? I hope you liked my projects! I will have some more to share soon, because my head is spinning with ideas! And with all those amazing new collections being released now, I have to make room and use up some more paper! For now, thanks for visiting and have a beautiful day!

Hugs and Love,

Vanessa

Supplies:

Patterned Paper, Digital Elements: Echo Park Paper (Country Drive Collection)

Stamps: Hero Arts

Ink: Tsukineko, Ranger Industries

Buttons: Papertrey Ink

Dies: Sizzix, Spellbinders

Other: floss, pom-pom trim, black marker, white box, paper bag