A Mothers Keepsake

Hello all!  This project I did for Mother's Day, but it could be used for a birthday or holiday etc.  It took a lot of work but it  turned out beautiful!!

 This year for Mother's Day I felt it was important to create this keepsake book for my mom.  There are 7 children in my family and I asked each one of them to write some of their precious feelings about my mother's talents.

This book is made up of some very thin wooden pages.  After getting all the written work from my family I decided I needed more pages so I got a second book so there are eight pages, 2 each of the same pattern.

I used an airesol spray glue so that the paper would become part of the wood by sanding it.

I used my distress ink to go around the edges of the wooden pages as well as the front edges of the paper to give it that nice vintage aged look.  Here are some close up pictures of this. 

Notice the aging on the corner edges.  This paper originally looked like this picture below.

One of the most difficult things about this book is that it has the square openings.  This makes it beautiful and unique, however you have to be careful when placing things so that it doesn't show when you don't want it to, and also be able to incorporate what you want to show through, and also making it look nice on the actual page the embellishment is on.  Here is a sample of the window and the page behind it close up.

I also wanted everyone's name on their page so my mom would know which pages were written by which child.  It was also a bit challenging to take what they had written and make if fit on the page and not just look ordinary and one typed block in the middle but have a nice layout and incorporate their names as well.

Here are some pictures of the pages together.

Notice the orange ribbon.  This ribbon goes all the way around the page.  Here's a view from both sides.

May Arts has some awesome choices in burlap.  Check out the QW11 burlap loop I've used on these pages.  Plus guess how many other colors it comes in?  Ten colors!!!!  How cool is that?!

These two pages were things written by the grandkids.

This NK16 olive ribbon also goes all the way around on this page.  Below I have connected it to the bottom stanza.

Here I used some wooden tags for my name and the word mother.  I coverd them with paper, distress inked the edges and tied some lovely ribbon through the hole.

These family history stickers by Stamping Stantion were absolutely perfect here making it look like sillouhettes of my mom's seven children.

This rose turned out really cute using the EM32 gold net. I also used SM33-string burlap and threaded it through the 361-58-10 crochet.

This came together really nicely even though I'm a novice at page layouts.

Other products I used were from:

The Paper Loft,

The Paper Studio,

Petaloo,

and the Stamping Station.

May Arts ribbon used:

Sheer Wrinkled NK02,04,09,16,30,32,33

Silky Crush UK02,30,32,36

String Burlap SM14,16,33

EM16,32 Net

Thanks for joining me today!  I hope this gives you some good ispiration for some of your projects.  Don't forget we love to hear your comments!!!

Andrea 

Project made for http://www.mayarts.com/blog/