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 I had some birthdays in the family that were coming up that I wanted to make some homemade gifts for, and what better gift than a book that organizes all of your birthdays? :) These cute little books were inspired by The Birthday Organization Challenge by the uber talented gals over at Papertrey Ink.
Every month I panic because I don't remember what birthdays are coming up and who I need to send a card to. Well, Birthday books to the rescue! What a cool idea - It's a simple concept all wrapped up in a pretty, and functional, book that you can leave on your desk.
Basically, each page is a month where you mark down all of your birthdays on the front, and on the back is a handy attached envelope for stamps and address labels for all of the birthdays you are sending to for the month. In the past, when it was time to send a birthday card, I was always scrambling to find the address (and a stamp!)- and sometimes this small task made me late in sending it out. Not any more! In addition to the book which sits on my desk for a handy reference, I also have a Word document stored on my computer which is titled "Birthday Labels". This document has all of the addresses of the people I need to send birthday greetings to for the entire year. This makes addressing my envelopes so easy, and updating or adding any info is a snap. I can keep this document updated and use it year after year. I print out the labels just once for the year and then store them in the appropriate month envelopes in my book. I also purchase a book of Forever stamps at my local Costco. The stamps are separated into appropriate quantities for each month and added to the corresponding envelopes with the address labels. At the end of each month, I prepare all of my envelopes & cards for the birthdays that will be celebrated the following month.
For the pages, I first downloaded the free template provided by Nicole. I brought the pages into Photoshop and added in all of the family birthdays for each month. Next was the always difficult decision of figuring out what papers to as the background pages for each book. I made two books, one for my mother, and one for my mother-in-law, so I tried to pick out different papers that each would enjoy. Unfortunately, I didn't have a lot of stock of the Papertey colored cardstock, (which is amazingly awesome) which I wanted use, so I had to go through my regular stock. Papertrey has such great quality cardstock - heavy weight and fabulous colors. I ended up using assorted pastel colors of my Bazzil cardstock for one of the books, and for the other one I used a digital damask paper from one of my all time favorite digital collections from Andrea Victoria at Designer Digitals. It is from her Pina collection. I combined that with a fun and whimsical polka dot digital paper from Rhonna Farrer's Sassy Kit. I also added some cute glitter stickers to the pages from the Die Cuts with a View Sweet collection. Soooo cute!
After all of the pages were printed, I assembled the books and using my Zutter Bind-It-All, which was actually only the second time I had ever used it!!! For those of you who have purchased one of these awesome little machines, and have never used it, I highly recommend digging it out of your closet and actually using it. It is nerve-wracking, yes, I agree, but you will absolutely LOVE it once you get used to it. Of course, I decided to use it for an odd-sized LONG project, so I was extra nervous! :) Each book is 9.5 x 4.25, so when it came time to punch the holes, I had to really figure out how to use it right, or my pages would not be lined up! Lining up the pages from the center of the project and determining the number of holes per page was key to the success of my binding. Since I couldn't punch all of the pages at once, this was especially important. Ultimately, it all worked out in the end, thanks to the great tutorial videos that Zutter has on their site to help you learn the system.
All in all, it turned out to be such a cute project, but what I love most about it is the functionality. Such a helpful and convenient way to keep your yearly birthdays on track and on schedule!!!
To see more pictures of the albums, please make sure to check out my Design Gallery. Thanks for looking!
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