Hanna's Birthday Gift

Turning 2 with Blue

This is an album I made for Hanna's birthday present. It is made using an acrylic album I was given at the scrapbooking convention. I was a volunteer and one of the teachers was very kind and gave it to me for free. (Yay!) Her business is called The Button Farm and she makes fabulous kits with full color instructions.

Here is a pic of the acrylic album:


Hanna's birthday party theme is Blue's Clues. She loves the show.

Working with an acrylic album was a new experience for me, but I liked the end result. There was only one mishap where I forgot you could see through to the other side and I put glue in spots that showed on the reverse. Lucky for me, the glue wiped off.

Here is the album:


















































Here are the details:
I think it's neat how if you plan correctly, you can see some of the items on the other pages. For example, here you can see the red flowers on the scalloped edge which are not on the cover page. I paper-pieced Blue using an image from on-line as my guide.




This is the reverse of the cover page. You can see the bow from the front. (I like how the tag reads, "Party Time," and I included the clock as the flower center. Time. Clock. Get it? Haha.)




This page is where the red flowers have been added. It also has a hidden journaling tag. Below are the close-ups.













I love how I got the part of the paper with red and blue paws.




I used the red flowers from the previous page as backgrounds for the little yellow flowers. I left room below the mat for journaling.



I like this page a lot. I learned this trick from the class I volunteered in. These acrylic albums are perfect for doing this kind of thing (hinges, flaps, hidden journaling, etc.) because there are no page protectors.
The top mat lifts up to reveal spots for two additional photos, top and bottom, so that 3 photos can fit on this one page. It's a great way to add extra storage to an album.




Rachel mentioned she was doing cupcakes for Hanna's friends, so I included a 3-D cupcake here. I thought this page worked well for the cupcake photos because of the stickers which show Blue's friends. I was thinking that a photo or a couple of photos of Hanna and her friends eating cupcakes would look cute here. I often find myself imagining how pages could be used. Who knows if that will end up happening. I like how the added dash of green in the paper goes with the cupcake wrapper and the little green dog. I left this page without a mat so that there was one page where the orientation of the photo wasn't necessarily horizontal and where, if Rachel chose, there could be more than one photo.




I like this page. I punched the balloons out with a punch and added the string with a red sharpie which writes really well on the acrylic (but be careful not to make any mistakes!:-)). I didn't like how the yellow background was so high on the acrylic page so I added a strip of turquoise to the bottom and really like how it came out. I love making mistakes that end up working out better than the original idea.



Here I felt I needed another type of printed paper, but I was tired of the ones I'd already used. I like how this paper ties in the green from the previous page.



On this page, I was trying to use more of the turquoise. It's a little plain but I didn't feel like adding stripes or polka dots to the paper as I'd already done that earlier. This one was a tough one for me and I played with the colors and other papers a lot, but everything I tried just didn't work because of the page that lays opposite this one in the album. So I decided to keep it simple. It feels a little too simple to me, but trust me, it worked better than anything else. Keeping the color palette simple was the best way to go, especially because the epoxy stickers include a pink color and I didn't want to add any additional pink elements.




I wasn't sure is Rachel would want any photos on the back since they might get scratched. I decided to leave it blank and gave her some of the scraps to use if she wants to add a photo mat or something here.