April 2010 Main Kit
Spring Mini Book Tutorial
By Katie Turner
1. Take your mini book apart. Needle-nose pliers will help with bending the coils back enough so that you can twist the wire out of the binding holes.
2. Set aside the back chipboard cover and three sheets of the cardstock pages. On the front chipboard cover, draw a line 6 cm (2.4 in) from the bottom. Do the same with the remaining pages after clamping them to ensure they don’t slip. Set the front cover aside.
3. Grab the American Crafts Remarks journaling stickers and cut out the bottom sticker (right below the cloud sticker). It should have a caterpillar and a branch on it. You’ll want to leave the backing on for now; just cut around the outside of the sticker, being sure to snip into the corners.
4. Center the sticker (with the backing still on it) on the lower part of the clamped stack of pages, below the line you drew earlier. Trace around it. You’ll notice that the leaves from the branch extend below where the bottom edge of the sticker should be – don’t worry about it! We’ll fix this in the next step.
5. Flip the journaling sticker around and finishing tracing.
6. You’ll end up with a slightly bigger, fancy rectangle, which is exactly what we want.
7. Now for the most time consuming part – you’ll need to cut out the window from each page in the stack, except the last two, which will be the base to make sure everything is nice and sturdy at the end of the project. You can use an X-Acto knife (which is why the pages are clamped) or trace the window on all the remaining pages and cut them out with sharp, detail-oriented scissors, like Cutterbees. It’s up to you! It doesn’t have to be perfect, so don’t fret.
8. Here’s what it should look like – don’t forget to leave those bottom two pages alone! Set the stack aside.
9. Pick up the chipboard cover, which is the one that should have the line drawn on it. An X-Acto knife is pretty helpful for the next step.
10. Gently cut along the line until the bottom piece of chipboard falls away. You won’t be needing it anymore for this project.
11. Grab the sheet of October Afternoon Thrift Shop paper – with the floral design on the front – and flip it over. Adhere the chipboard cover to the back.
12. Cut around the cover using your X-Acto knife, and you’ll end up with the base of your front cover!
13. I like to re-punch covered holes right away to make sure I know exactly where the holes are. The Crop-A-Dile is perfect for this!
14. Take your beautiful Hambly overlay with the elephants on it and adhere it on top of the floral paper. I used the top left corner of the transparency for this part, so that I’d end up with an elephant on the lower right of my chipboard cover. Remember to re-punch your holes!
15. Turn your cover over and adhere the floral paper to the back of it as well. Once again, punch, punch, punch. I also used a sanding block to sand the edges of the paper to smooth everything out, but you don’t have to.
16. Remember those three pages we set aside earlier? Grab those and trim them 6 cm (2.4 in) from the bottom. They’ll end up being the same height as your cover. Set them aside again.
17. Pick up your back cover and mark which side is the inside of it and which side is the outside; this is important because the punched holes of the front and back covers will need to match up in the end.
18. Adhere the Little Yellow Bicycle Sky Blue Check paper to both the inside and outside of the back cover. Mark the inside and outside again to help you to remember how to put things back together; if you use a pencil to do this, you can just erase the marks after you’re all done.
19. So, this is what you should have in front of you: The back cover, the stack of pages with two whole sheets on the very bottom and the rest containing windows, the cover-length pages (three in total), and the cover.
20. Bind it all back together! Twist the coil back in and then use your pliers to bend the two end wires back so that your book won’t come undone.
21. Decide which photo you want showing through the window and trim it accordingly. I left a little of the scenery to the left of mine because I’ll be embellishing that area later.
22. Adhere your photo to the back of the last page containing a window; you could also adhere it to the front of the first whole page on the very bottom of the stack.
23. Before we adhere everything together, let’s embellish the edges of the book so that we’ll have some cute edges sticking out , creating visual interest and something fun to look at. Take some of your Melody Ross cards and cut the edges off them (many are scalloped) and adhere those edges on random pages. Stagger them for more variety! I even cut one edge into small strips and adhered them along the bottom of my book.
24. Once you’re satisfied with how things look, adhere the pages together, except for the following: Leave the three shorter pages free – I just flipped them up and out of the way along with the cover – as well as the very first page with a window; we’ll be gluing the latter down later. For this step, I used Mod Podge, but you could also use dry adhesive like a tape runner. Just be aware that if you keep applying adhesive in the same places (i.e.: the edges), you’re going to create some bulk. That is okay! We’ll be decorating the edges of the pages later on. If the bulk bothers you, though, you’ll want to vary where you apply your adhesive. For example, on one page it’ll be on the very outside edge, the next an inch to the right, the next two inches to the right, etc.
25. I cut a rectangle slightly bigger than the window out of the American Crafts Remarks packaging – for this step you could use anything clear, though. Think acetate, a sheet of transparency, etc. I then adhered it to the bottom of the very top window page.
26. Afterwards, I decided to embellish the open area to the left of my photo with a Flair badge, so I lifted the outermost page and stuck the badge down inside the window. Once you’re satisfied with how things look, go ahead and glue the top page down. Your basic window is complete – aside from the embellishing, of course!
27. Next, I painted the edges of the window, as well as painting vines down the sides of the stack of pages that were adhered together. I painted the edges of my album completely green. This complements the roses I made out of thin strips of the pink cardstock also found in the kit. To create the roses, I simply distressed the edges of the strips and then coiled them together. Wrapping them around a toothpick is helpful!
28. If you have any imperfections you’re not happy with on the sides of your book, gluing the roses down over them will fix that! I also added some of the Little Yellow Bicycle Border Stickers to the bottom of the window and on the cover before I embellished it with the Prima letters. Embellish to your heart’s content!
If you end up using this tutorial, or are inspired by any part of it, please let me and the other Crazy Daisy girls see what you did with it! We can’t wait to check out your projects. 
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