Saturday, September 19, 2015

A dull scrapbooking post about altering page protectors

A bummer of a title,but I am super proud that I managed to make this work and I wanted to share it with you. Be warned, though: only pictures of page protectors--no pretty photos on this post!

I have mentioned before that I like to make my vacation albums 8.5x11 potbound. (Side note--my computer keeps changing "postbound" to "potbound." I hope I caught and edited all of them, but in case I missed one, please know I'm not referring to drugs!) Those albums are pretty hard to find nowadays. I LOVED the Stampin' Up! 8.5x11 postbound albums, but they discontinued them years ago. Sadly. As a substitute, I bought a few of these on clearance at Archiver's years ago:


I didn't buy any extra page protectors, though, which is something I've since learned: just like when I buy a stamp pad I always get the refill, now when I buy an album, I always get extra page protectors too.

In this case, I had used one album to scrap my Disney vacation. To scrap that vacation, which needed tons of page protectors, I raided the second album that I had bought for some of its page protectors, which left this album a little thin for the Custer State Park vacation I was going to use it for. When I checked my supplies, I had two different kinds of  page protectors:


On the left are Stampin' Up! extras--a lot of them--and on the right are the 4 leftover ones from the album itself. The problem?


When you lay them on top of each other, the album protectors are a hair shorter on the right than the SU ones. Damn. (On a side note, I just noticed that you can see me in the page protector--apparently I was wearing a purple shirt when I took this photo.) Since page protectors are pretty sturdy, I decided to be crafty and make the album page protectors a little longer on the right.

I had 4 album page protectors, but I only needed 2 for the album, so I cut the left edge off two and sewed them onto the other two, making them a little wider on the left:


After I did this and laid them on top of the SU page protectors, voila! It all lined up.


I suppose it didn't really matter that they didn't line up on the right, but I'm fairly type A and knew it would drive me crazy when I looked through the album. As a result, I decided it was worth the effort to try to even them up.

I did manage to edit and print the photos from this vacation before the summer was done, so I will be finished with this album within the next month. I'll share it once I'm done!

3 comments:

Unknown said...

We R Memory Makers also makes a number of variations of the 8.5 x 11 page protectors, if you are requiring more.

Jennifer Larson said...

Oh, wow. I will have to check it out! Thanks!

Tracy said...

I have done similar things for my own albums, to make everything fit nicely!