Small Stores and Special Album Covers

On Tuesday, my neighbor and I went to a nearby store and had a great time checking out some new products.  The store is called "Ink About It" (clever name!) and they always have lots of lovely stamps, papers, tools and wonderful samples.  They had a table (the "Art Bar") set up with a cute card project that you could do for $2 - so of course we had to sit down and make the card.

We used stamps and honeycomb paper from Inky Antics - the collection is called the "Honey Pop" collection and includes specialized stamp sets and lots of colors of the honeycomb fold paper.  They did not have any more orange honeycomb paper so we make brown pumpkins.  We colored the stamped images with colored pencils and hand cut the apron from another piece of patterned paper that had been stamped with the same cute mouse image.

I have lots of memories of the honeycomb paper bells and balls for Christmas decorations when I was growing up.  The honeycomb makes a great pop-up surprise inside a card.  If you click HERE you can see the various sets of stamps they make to work with the honeycomb papers.

We had a nice time talking with the staff about techniques and products and when we were leaving, we ran into one of the ladies who came to our small Cricut get together earlier this summer (hi Renee!).  It was a nice outing and we even were able to get our names on the list for the new fall limited edition Tim Holtz distress inks.

While I love to get things on sale online and find "deals" in the clearance aisles of the large chain stores, I think it is important to spend some of my crafting budget at small stores.  The interactions of staff and customers, the classes and the spontaneous meetings with fellow crafters are great benefits of having a local store and we need to buy from these stores to keep them open and prosperous.  If you are in the Boston area, here is a LINK to the store website - I'm sure they'd love to have you stop in and see what they have to offer.  You can also visit their blog HERE.  Say "hi" for me!

There is something new from Creative Memories that I want to share with you...

One of the main reasons I became a Creative Memories consultant was the excellent quality of their albums.  I was so excited when they added a new option for albums - custom albums made with your own photo or layout as the cover.   There is a sale for just one week and you can save 30% on the regular price of this new type of album until September 27th.

Here is the information from the Creative Memories flyer about these albums.

You Create It Custom Albums let you add personalization to the cover of your scrapbook album. Photos, designs and text of your choice will really make your album stand out on the shelf. See how to create your custom album and get inspired with ideas. Take advantage of a special one-week sale, and get your Custom Album 30 percent off!
You Create It Custom Albums feature a pebble-textured laminate material and have the same high quality and features as our other 12x12 scrapbook albums. Custom albums are available with your choice of white or black material for the album’s spine and back cover.
It’s easy to get started, simply visit the Creative Memories Digital Center (creativememories.com/digital) and choose one of the three ways to create it. Want a complete album? Add Scrapbook Pages and Page Protectors or Side-Loading Sleeves to your custom album order. See the Digital Center for pricing details.

When you create one of these albums you have three choices - you can use one photo for the entire cover like the samples above...

You can create your cover using some pre-designed templates available in the Digital Center...or...

You can design it yourself using the StoryBook Creator Plus 3.0 program (This is about to be upgraded to 4.0 but you can still get the download version on sale for half price - just $32.48 and then you will be able to buy the upgrade for a total price that is less than the new 4.0 program will cost.  The upgrade is due any time now so I am not sure how long this link will work).  If  you are a Mac user, you can create the album cover with sbcStudio software for Mac.

Here are a few more sample of album covers.  You can choose a white or a black spine and back cover.  I am planning to order a few while the sale is on.  I think a wedding album cover would be great - I just have to find the perfect photo from the hundreds we took!

Here are the options and pricing for the albums - you can get just the coverset or add pages and page protectors.  These albums are ordered through the Creative Memories Digital Center.

Here is the link for the Digital Center  -  http://digital.creativememories.com/     When you go to the Digital Center, you will need to register (see the top left of the page) and add the code for your consultant.  If you don't have a consultant, my consultant number is 82352282 and I would be happy to help you with any questions about this or any other Creative Memories products.  You will also get a credit for 20 free prints when you register at the digital center for the first time.

This little snip of a photo shows some of the beautiful quilts that members of my quilt guild made over the summer and showed at our meeting Wednesday night.  I haven't done much quilting for a while but I was inspired by the meeting and I think I may get out a few of my fabrics to incorporate in some of my next projects.

Do you have a favorite local scrapbook/craft/stamping shop?  I'd love to hear about it.  

What do you think of these personalized album covers?  I can't wait to get mine ordered!


Subscribe to Capadia Designs