Making a Card Album

For about two years now, I've had this dilemma.  Wedding cards.

I'm sure some of you can relate. :)  We got so many beautiful cards, so many encouraging notes, that even the "minimalist" inside me cringed at the thought of just tossing them all out!

Finally, one day, in amongst my usual exploring of Pinterest, I found this beautiful tutorial, and the solution to my card dilemma!

Source: somethingturquoise via Caleigh on Pinterest

So I decided to do my own version.  I do crafts a lot like I do cooking, I read the recipe, and then go do my own thing based on the ingredients. :)  (I do sometimes follow recipes exactly, but not very often! :P)

Our wedding cards as they were:

First step, I organized the cards into three piles: small, medium, and large.  This part wasn't included in the original tutorial, but when you have over 300 guests at your wedding, you end up with a lot of cards! 

Next step: I needed to find cardboard to make the backs and fronts of each of the albums.  We had a few smaller boxes around that worked for the small and medium albums, but nothing was working for the large one.  Not being the most patient person, especially when I get excited about a project, I finally remembered that we have a small space heater.  And seriously, who keeps their heater in its' original box?!  So this box got cut up, and the biggest album had its' covers. :)

 

The most monotonous part was probably the hole punching.  There were a lot of cards = a lot of holes!  But I got it all done, ruining just one hole punch in the process. :P

I didn't take any pictures of it while I was doing all the glueing and paper cutting and stuff, so you get to jump ahead to the finished product!

Ta-Da! :)

I'm thrilled with how it turned out!  Now we can look through our cards whenever we want, and we have them on display (or not) instead of stuffed away in a shoe box in our closet. :)

For those of you who were counting, I haven't "quite" finished the other two albums yet, but they'll look pretty similar to this one. :) I just got so excited I wanted to share it with you all!