The Cheap Girl's Version of Album Embossing

I've really been trying to distract myself from this upcoming dental surgery so I decided to go through all my scrapbook albums and reorganize them.  I had, at one time, tried to put them into some semblance of chronological order but had found it challenging to keep album sizes fairly standard.  Some ended up quite thick while others were sparse.  Then there was the problem of the children's pictures.  Did I include them in the general yearly pics or try to put them in separate albums dedicated just to the children?

I finally decided to pull out all of my Thanksgiving and Christmas pictures and put those in separate scrapbooks.  I also did separate albums for each child but kept general pictures with the kids in them in the yearly albums unless it was a significant event, such as a high school graduation.  Those pics went in their own albums.  Finally I created specialty albums such as wedding albums and heritage albums.

Well, now that I had those all reorganized, I decided to just start filling up the yearly albums and when one got to a good bulk, I'd switch to the next album, whether it meant combining years or not.  I figured I'd identify these by embossing the spines, giving the date range.  I was going to use Creative Memories' embossing service.  In fact, I still had the box I had originally purchased years ago to send the album spines and/or covers off.  Now I was finally going to do it.  I pulled off all the spine covers and decided what I wanted to label them and then went online to see what the charge was going to be.  Horror of horrors!  I hadn't realized that they were only going to imprint the older-sized albums until the end of January 2012.  All of my albums that needed imprinted were in this category and we were now into March.  My window of opportunity was closed.

Well, I could have stopped right there and decided I would just forget embossing them.  Or I could have decided to find a place in the area or on the Web that could do it for me, instead of Creative Memories. But in a moment of inspiration (some might call it insanity), I decided to label the albums myself.  I grabbed some old pamphlets that I had about lettering, gathered some of my calligraphy pens, found a measuring tool and improvised for things to hold the spine covers flat.

I decided that I wanted all of my "labeling" to be at about the same height on the spine so that it would look nice and uniform when my albums were on the shelves.  Another challenge was that I have different colored albums.  One color of pen might not look so great or show up well on another color of album.  I settled on a metallic silver pen for my main labeling.

I kept it pretty simple.  I guess I could have stenciled the labels but frankly, I think the hand-done look adds to the charm and reflects the personality of the album maker.  As I finished each spine, I stacked them on nearby surfaces and let them dry overnight.

After I'd do the initial labeling in the silver, I'd outline the letters in a fine-point permanent marker.  Then I added a few little embellishments to finish the look.

For my holiday albums, I got a little more creative and drew a Christmas tree on the Christmas album and a pumpkin on the Thanksgiving album.

The end result?  Well, I think they'll do just fine and even if they aren't as polished-looking as if they were done professionally, I can console myself with the fact that I saved myself about $14 an album......and that's a lot of consoling.

Now, I still have fifteen hours until my dental surgery.  What can I get into next?