Betsy’s Family Folio album

Hello everyone!  Is everyone sick of winter yet?  I am, so I decided to make a non-winter project.  I have made a small family folio – made with envelopes!  I had a lot of fun making this simple folio…let me show you how!

I made my folio out of square cream envelopes.  I found that to minimize bulk, it was better to use thinner envelopes.  The examples I show in these pictures gives an example of how they are put together and the use of mini-slimline envelopes.  You can make these out of virtually any kind of envelope.

It is a matter of putting one flap inside of another.  To start, the 2 envelopes are together by inserting the flap of one into another. These first 2 form the front and back of the folio.  To keep going you only need to keep inserting one flap into another.  I have limited the ones I’ve made to five envelopes, although today’s project is made with 4 envelopes.

This is the black folio all put together.  There is a flap on the front, but I found that after I had adhered paper to the front, the flap really doesn’t show.

To start my project, I chose my paper pack.  I needed a pack that had papers that all coordinated with each other and that were fun. I chose 5 colors of plain card stock and cut 2 stripes of each color that were ½” side.  I cut a square out of copy paper and adhered the stripes.  I was able to repeat the colors twice.  I chose to use a die from my stash that was a stitched square with scallop on the inside.  I would use the frame on the cover and the evacuated piece on the back cover with a die cut heart in the center.  This heart die also had little hearts inside the main heart that I used on the cover.  I also used the square die to cut frames out of each color of card stock and 8 pcs of cream card stock. 

I really liked how the striped piece looked with the rest of the papers.

Before die cutting all of the cream card stock I ran a piece of cream through my printer with the title of my folio using the All About Me Alpha stamps. I changed the color to grey scale.  There was shading already on the letters, so I chose Copic markers in shades that matched the closest to the colors of the stripes of the frame and papers and then outlined them with a black pen.

Unfortunately, at some point I stabbed my finger with my craft pick, and of course, got blood on the cover!  Really, is it only me that this happens to?  So, I cut a piece of the green card stock – just a strip, and adhered it to the left edge to hide it after I put my patterned paper on the cover.  It made for a cute binding!

Once I had the backgrounds and sizing sorted it was time to print my family members.  I used the All The Family: Babies, Toddlers, Kids 1, Adults 1 and Adults 2.  I sized them out onto white card stock.

I colored all of their skin at the same time.  It was easier to do it that way for me. Next I colored those who had jeans on.  I was choosing items whose color was not in the palette of the paper.

Once the coloring was done, I fussy cut all of the images which was very easy to do.  Then I used a black water-based marker to go around the edges. All that was left to do was to adhere the family members to the pages I wanted and then I took Distress Watercolor Pencils and wrote – in my messiest handwriting, who they were.

When I was finished I added a die cut piece of rickrack in green cardstock, so it matched my binding and put it on the right side of the front and the left side of the back, tucking in 2 pieces of ribbon so the folio could be tied closed.  And that completed my project!

What a fun project this turned out to be!  Easy to do and so many possibilities to create!  It would even be cute to give it to a child with the people not colored so they could color them themselves!

Betsy

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You can find me on Instagram: @betsybirgeart

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