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HEREis a link to the supply list.
HEREis a link to all the photos.
First you need to get out the black covers Note: These are really nice sort of foam core boards. I thought they would be plain black chipboard, but they are much nicer than that!
I wanted this book to be really easy to use, so I thought that being able to punch holes in anything that DD brings home from school, with a regular 3 hole punch, would be the best option. So in order to do that, I used standard sized 3 hole punch spacing as a template for where to put my holes.
grab a piece of regular notebook paper, or punch holes using a 3 hole punch in a scrap piece of paper. This is just to get the spacing right. I laid my paper on top of the cover and sort of centered it, then marked the holes with a pencil. (I used the pencil to trace a line just inside the hole of the paper, but that left an indentation in the foam board and since my crop-a-dile isnt as big as a regular hole punch hole, you can still kind of see where I traced. So you might want to just make a dot in the center of each hole. Or don't worry about it and make the indented side the inside back of the finished book.)
Use a crop a dile or other hole punch to punch out holes on both boards.
Now line up your chipboard pieces inside the covers, as you want them to end up. (shouldnt matter which black cover is front or back unless - like me - you messed one up a little)
Note: if, like me, your holes are not perfectly symmetrical to the top and bottom of the board, the boards are now directional - which means that there will be a right side up on all of your pieces. You'll see what I mean if you try to line them up like you want to put the rings in. So, I suggest either writing on the chipboard ones -top and bottom- or just keep checking to make sure that all your holes match up. I didn't write on mine, but that would have been easier and since we are going to cover them with paper anyway, it would be fine. Once you are sure that your covers are both right-side-up and their holes line up, make pencil marks on the chipboard ones and punch those holes too.
Now this part was a bit of a pain, so, it is optional. But I like the idea that my cover is a little larger than the inside pages, so I trimmed a quarter of an inch off of three sides of each of the chipboard pieces. I did not trim from the edge with the holes because I didnt want to mess with the whole, holes lining up thing. Although, I suspect that trimming that edge would have been fine too. See how my chipboard is now centered over the black board?
Again, make sure all the holes line up and you have the right sides up. Note: the holes may not line up perfectly regardless of which side, just pick the one that is MORE CORRECT. It isnt a big deal if they are perfect just as long as when you are done, you can get the rings through, and they don't look all skewed.
Now, because I am a masochist, I thought it would be fun to have tabs on my divider pages. Again, you can skip this. I think it looks cute, but it is a ROYAL pain!
I took a die cut elongated rounded corner rectangle that just happened to be about 1/3 of the length of my pages. (it is about 1 inch wide and 3.5 inches long) If you happen to have a folder with a tab on it, or a tab die cut that would be fine too, but I couldn't find one.
I first made a line about a half inch in from the edge opposite the holes, then I traced half of the die cut as shown. - leaving just a little bit at the top.
Then since I wanted the bottom corners of the tab curved, I drew curves in freehand.
Now here comes the pain part. PLEASE be careful! cutting through chipboard is never fun or easy and we don't want anyone to need stitches. I used my metal ruler and my craft knife. I cut the long straight portion of the line first. I did not try to cut all the way through the chipboard on the first pass with the knife, rather I made a score line, then deepened it, repeat until it goes through. Then I used scissors to make a horizontal cut and cut that scrap off. Having that scrap gone, makes the next part easier. For the curves, I used scissors and just did the best I can. Don't worry if it isn't perfect, we are going to sand it later anyway.
Sorry that some of these pictures are terrible. The next step is to flip that first cut piece over and use the new tab to trace a tab onto the bottom of the next chipboard piece. Repeat the cutting part.
Then lay both cut pieces onto the last chipboard piece and trace the part in the middle - this is just to get the spacing right.
Then use one of the already cut tabs, to trace a tab that is centered in that open space. Repeat the cutting process. (This picture shows the empty space that has been traced, and one of the tabs getting ready to be placed over that spot and traced.)
Now lay it all together again and make sure that your holes line up still. (and admire your handiwork so far - boy it is starting to look like a book!)
Now, put the covers aside, get out the mod podge (or other liquid adhesive) and cover that first page. Glue a piece of red cardstock to it. Since I was using the Bo Bunny Double Dot paper, I decided to use the not dotted side on the fronts of the pages and the dotted side on the backs of the pages.
Let that page dry while you move on to the second page, where you will glue a black piece of cardstock to it and then the final page where you will glue a blue piece of cardstock to it.
Make sure the paper and glue are dry before moving on, otherwise you will get some tearing of the paper - or maybe that was just my dull craft knife from all that chipboard cutting. Don't worry too much about a little tearing, we are still going to sand later.
Next, go back and trim the excess off of the first page, and punch holes in the red paper so that those holes line up with the ones on the original chipboard. Repeat with the other two pages.
Go back and repeat the gluing and trimming for the other sides of the three pages. The backs should be the same color as the fronts.
Now put those pages aside to let them really dry (or you could be starting this next step while they are drying. But if you didnt finish the chipboard pages yet, just make sure that your matching red, blue and black cardstocks have been set aside for the backs of the pages)
Now, cut an 8x8 square from the block party stripe paper. Cut an 8.5 x 8.5 square from another sheet of red cardstock. Ink both squares with black ink on the edges and set aside to dry.
Now, Bo Bunny has 'cut outs' papers in each of their lines. I didn't get the one that matches this line because I wasnt planning on using it, but I saw this shape on the Sun Kissed paper and thought it would be perfect. So I cut it out of that paper and used it to trace onto the paper that I wanted. You can use whatever shape you like. You probably have something similar lying around, or if you have a die cut machine - even better then you don't have to trace it. This shape is slightly smaller than 6x6 so that I could get 4 of them from one sheet of paper. So that is what I did, I traced it 4 times and cut all 4 out
Then again because I'm a masochist, I thought it would be nice to have a solid border around each of these. So I traced this shape again, but slightly outside the edge, onto solid blue cardstock and cut that out. After the first one was done, I used it to trace 3 more - one more blue, one black and one red. (don't worry about how it has letters and is 'finished' in the second picture, we haven't gotten to that yet)
Now take all of your patterned paper shapes and ink them in black.
Then glue them onto the solid shapes. Note: if you did not use a diecut machine, your cuts and tracing are probably not perfect so you may have to rotate and maybe flip the pieces until you get the best fit. Do that for all of them before you get the glue out. Then make sure you keep them facing the same way while you are gluing them. (I even had to trim one a little bit because it just didn't fit right on the mat.) I think they are not glued down in this picture because that black on sure looks crooked to me. Once you get the best fit on all of yours, glue them down, then ink around the outside (cardstock) edges. (I didn't ink the black one because, what's the point, you can't see it anyway?! Unless you are using white core cardstock of course.)
Now back to those pages - get your sand paper out and sand those babies! I love it that these papers are a little distressed, so you can get away with a little distressing and it only makes it look better. I loved how it looked on the edges that I almost left it that way, but my black didnt look right because I was using Bazzill black and so I got no visible edges and all you could see was the chipboard from the middle.
so I liberally inked the edges of all the pieces - the goal being to cover the chipboard.
Ok now we are ready to start working on the pockets. You should have a scrap from the striped paper that is about 8x4. And you probably have a scrap of red cardstock also. I laid my patterned paper down on top of the cardstock so that there is about a quarter of an inch at the top, and an inch or so on the left. Then I made marks with a pencil where I should cut so there is about an inch on the bottom and the right. I guess that would make the red piece about 10 x 5.25.
Now we want to fold the three sides under to create the parts of the pocket that we will glue down, but we want to fold it such that the finished front of the pocket is about a half inch bigger than the piece of patterned paper, so there will be a quarter inch border on all sides. So, I just eyeballed it and made pencil marks. But I guess the measurement would be that you want to fold 3/4 an inch on all sides (except the top).
When it is folded, it will look like this (the paper is just laying on the top.)
FYI - this is how I folded the edges. I lined my ruler up with the pencil marks, held very tightly so it didnt move and folded the paper over the ruler, by placing the paper flat and the ruler on top - still holding the paper and just laid the ruler down. But you can fold it however you want.
This is nearly impossible to see, but I cut a little triangle out of the inside of the folded corners to just remove some of the bulk and make the pockets lay more flatly.
Now you want to grab another patterned paper and cut two 8x4 pieces out of it. Then repeat the pocket making procedure with a piece of blue and a piece of black cardstock. Ink the edges of your patterned paper pieces, then glue them down onto the pockets. It doesn't really matter which goes on which.
Next you want to glue the pockets to the fronts of the chipboard divider pages. The idea is going to be - that you want to have all three colors of cardstock on each page - so you see in the photo below I have a blue background, a red pocket and a black frame. (we are not gluing the frame parts yet though)
To glue the pockets down, I used my T-square. I placed the top of the T-square ruler at 2.5 inches from the bottom. Then I lined the lower right corner of the pocket up with the 9.75 line on the ruler.
NOTE: I chose to position the pocket slightly off center towards the bottom of the page so that taller items would fit into it and not stick out the top of the book. It does look slightly off center (because it is!) I chose to go with function over aesthetic in this case. You may choose to completely center it if you want.
If you are using zip dry like I was, you will want to close the cap of the zip dry in between each pocket. Then I carefully positioned the pocket (if you move it around too much the glue might get off the edges and glue some portion of your pocket closed. Also, I held the pocket in place for about a minute before moving it to another position to dry fully. Holding it in place I felt was critical to having it not pop up at all and move glue around.
Boy was it funny trying to take this photo. I really needed both hands to hold the pocket down while it dried, but then I wouldnt have been able to hold the camera. So, I put the bottle on the one corner then had to lean as far back as possible - without moving my left hand- to get a half decent photo.
After the glue was set a little I moved the whole page over and placed a stack of paper and some weights on top of it to hold it down tightly while it dried. then repeat for the other two pockets.
Now, while those are drying, back to the cover. First I inked the edges (can't remember if I told you to do that yet, so Ill say it again) Then I glued the striped paper to the cardstock. Next, I again used my T-square to get it straight, and glued down the square to the center of the cover.
Then you will want to center your letters on your frame thing to make the title. Finally, glue the frame down in the center of the square.
Next, apply the titles to the frames for the pages. (You want to do this before you glue them down just in case you mess one up - you can make another frame and not mess up the whole page. Just make sure you are putting the correct title on the correct page - if you care what order they go in.)
I used: Art, Grades and Misc
in that order so Art went on the first red page, grades on the black, misc on the blue. I did it this way because my DD is in Kindergarten and she will have a lot more art than anything else and I don't want to have to be constantly flipping to the back to find where the new art goes. Although now that I think about it, it might have been easier to just open the back cover every time I want to put new art in, but oh well.
Once you have figured out what titles you want and got them centered on your frames, you need to glue them down on the pockets. Be sure not to glue the top of the frames which would then glue the pocket closed. I applied the glue to the pocket and then put a little on the side 'points' of the frame. After I pressed the frame down firmly, I stuck my ruler in the pocket to make sure I had not unintentionally glued something together.
Finally, go back and add any additional decoration that you would like. I cut stars and circles with my Cricut.
voila! we are done! hope you enjoyed this project. I have a ton of stuff sitting around from summer camp, but I am resisting the urge to put that in here because this is supposed to be for kindergarten, so what to do with the stuff from camp? hmmm
