School Year Albums

The other day I shared some back to school goodies and today I have a really fun back-to-school post to share with you.  Maggie from Midwestern Girl is a master of paper crafts.  Her scrapbooking, cards, and journals are beautiful!  And it’s your lucky day because today she’s posting here, sharing the cutest handmade school year albums!

Hi everyone! I’m so excited to be here on Dukes and Duchesses, guest-posting for my girl, Randi! Woo hoo!  My name is Maggie and I write over at Midwestern Girl.  I would LOVE to have you drop by to say hello!

I have a fun little project that we made at the end of last summer to share today.

I know summer is only half over, but it’s never too early to start getting ready for the new school year. My kids and I {well, actually just me but the kids were easily convinced} thought it would be fun to make little notebooks for their teachers to have for the new school year so we made these little school year albums.

We started by taking some graphics we found at The Graphics Fairy, a file folder {with an awesome black houndstooth pattern}, and some Mod Podge.

I printed out the graphics onto cardstock, cut them to size, and then Mod Podged them to the file folder.

After the Mod Podge was dry, I cut out the graphics with a small border of houndstooth.  These then became the front and back covers of our albums.

We cut some loose leaf  and some graphing paper that we had lying around in half and added it in between the covers. Then I took some book-binding tape I had, wrapped it around what would be the spine of the album and stapled through the tape and all of the pages for reinforcement.

After that, we just picked some embellishments: deco tape, stickers, gems and added them to the albums. Easy peasy.

Finally, we found some little sheets of school-themed paper…cut them down, stapled a ribbon to the top and slid them into the albums to be used as bookmarks.

I think these little books took all of about ten minutes each to make {minus the drying time} but I really like the way they turned out and I think the kids’ teachers will, too!

For another great way to document the school year, be sure to check out these stitched journal cards that are perfect for the scrapbook or Project Life album!