Treasure Island Books - Quality Used and Out-of-Print Books -

Treasure Island Books

Specializing in quality used and out-of-print books since the Twentieth Century

This is the scrapbook I made my parents-in-law for their 50th
wedding anniversary.

The scrapbook holds 50 years' worth of photos of their eight
children, eleven grandchildren, and three great-grandchildren.
My mother-in-law and many of the rest of the family are fond
of taking photos but not putting them in albums. That made it
easier for me to sort through THOUSANDS of photos and
create a scrapbook for them.

Because there were so many, MANY photos to use, I decided
to hand-build the scrapbook itself. The instructions I found on
HGTV's website...their scrapbooking show had instructions to
make a small, thin scrapbook. I enlarged on the idea
considerably and, to be honest, would not recommend it!

There are eight "signatures" (bundles of pages, similar to
what you'd see in a hard-bound book). Each signature has 16
pages. You flick the abacus.

It measures approximately 18 inches by 22 inches and is
approximately 8 inches thick.

This book is heavy and unwieldy and undoubtedly annoys
anyone who wants to sit and look at it for any length of time.
You can't hold it in your lap; you need to lay it on a table.

The four straps holding it closed I stitched in uneven peyote
stitch using #11 silver-lined red and two shades of gold
Czechoslovakian seed beads. There's no real significance to
the designs in the straps, other than I quickly grew weary of
stitching row after row after row of the same thing. The
letters are my own design. The straps are closed with lobster
claw clasps. Several strands of glass beads and metal
charms in a variety of wedding-related designs decorate the
top spine corner.

The pages have a base of posterboard and most of them are
covered with scrapbooking papers and, of course,
photographs. The covers are foam core board...the front one
is covered with fabric with batting underneath and the back
one is covered in scrapbooking paper.

Admittedly, this isn't one of my better efforts. I didn't think
any of the project through and certainly didn't take into
account that an enlarged version of a simple, SMALL
scrapbook might not work so great in the long run! I was
gung-ho about it at first but, as the months passed (I had over
a year to put this together), I found myself ignoring it until
October when I basically did little else than work on this and
our bookstore for the next two months. (Dale is a VERY
understanding man, able to live among clutter for months on
end...one of the many reasons I love him!) As my deadline
loomed then passed, I started to panic and simply didn't put
my best work into the finishing of this. I should have painted
all the spine ends instead of just the outer ones, for starters.
And I should have stitched more length on the straps instead
of backing them with satin ribbon. I also miscalculated the
thickness of the book and there's actually more strap length
than is needed. But I told my mother-in-law that she can
certainly add photos if she wants (I left her a few blank pages
in the back).