It's a Creative World: Butterfly Minibook

All About Us...

Welcome to IACW
We are a diverse group of talented, fun loving, crafters who want to share loads of great stuff with you. Inspired by colour, paper, fabric, nature, patterns, sounds, architecture, we love to create and we're not afraid to experiment. We have our roots from around the world and are constantly learning and gaining inspiration from the world around us. We hope you enjoy your visit to our blog.

Butterfly Minibook - a Year in Review

It's lovely to welcome back Mandy (of the amigurumi bauble fame) with another step by step tutorial for us, for Christmas Eve.

Year in Review, Butterfly Mini Book.

Hi, Mandy here.

I made a Year in Review, ‘Butterfly Mini Book’ for my Gran as a Christmas present.

She loves a bit of ‘bling’ and butterflies are her favourite thing so that’s why I chose that shape for the mini book, but any chipboard mini book would be fine. I can’t remember where I got it as it’s been in my stash for a while, but it only came with 3 actual chipboard pages and one ‘lattice’ front cover. I decided to use thick, double-sided patterned paper for the inner pages of the book and use the chipboard lattice on the front cover and a chipboard back cover. (This also means I have two chipboard butterflies left over to use on another mini book). I always think it’s best with mini books if you stick to one range of patterned paper & since I like the thickness of K &Co double-sided patterned paper I chose their ‘Wild Saffron’ range. I also decided to use rub-ons for the months on each page and just one binding-ring on the top left of the book.

Draw around a chipboard page onto the double-sided patterned paper. Make 5 of these inner pages and an extra one to glue behind the front cover ‘lattice’.

Cover the chipboard back cover in patterned paper, using plenty of glue (I use glue-stick).

Sand around the edges.

Choose the photos that best ‘highlight’ each month of the year. There is only one page per month so I was selective & chose photos that would interest my Gran the most. Re-size the photos and print them out. To save photo paper I squeezed as many as possible onto each piece of A4.

Ink around all the edges and all over the ‘feelers’ on the covers.

Use ‘Glimmer Mist’ to spray the chipboard lattice.

I sprayed blue at the edges of the wings…

Once dry, use Glossy Accents to glue the chipboard lattice to the extra patterned paper inner page.

My Gran likes ‘bling’ so I was generous with the glitter and little sequin hearts at the edge of the wings. Set aside this front cover to dry.

At this stage I laid out the inner pages of the mini book. It’s not possible to match the colours in the photos to the paper, but I tried to choose ‘greenish’ papers for Spring and ‘yellows’ for Summer etc.

Arrange, then glue the photos to the pages. I usually trim my photos with a white border to give them definition.

Apply rub-ons for each month.

Apply Glossy Accents to the ‘feelers’.

Have fun embellishing the pages. Use die-cuts, felt shapes, buttons and ‘bling’. Embellishments often look better grouped in layers, actually touching other elements on the page rather than ‘floating in space’. I used Glossy Accents to glue mine down because the Mini book will get a lot of handling.

Punch holes and set eyelets where the binding-ring is to go.

Because the pages are small, I decided to do some very minimal journaling on the inside of the front cover. Each month has a ‘Dymo’ tape label heading. I used ‘American Crafts Thickers’ for the year 2009.

Tie some matching ribbon around the binding-ring. Down the butterfly’s body there was just space to add a rub-on title ‘Special Memories’. Here are some of the inner pages…