Vintage-Style Scrappy Address Book

One of my goals this year was to get myself a good address book, so I could get all my friends' information in one easy-to-find (and use) place.

When I saw this phone stamp from Studio Calico, I knew exactly what I was going to make.

I took a 4x4 Maya Road chipboard binder, and some goodies from my stash and went to work.

At first I tried just embossing the phone stamp image onto the front of the binder. That was a total failure.

To cover it up, I used a vintage bingo card. I got a big pack of honest-to-goodness vintage bingo cards from the Freemont Sunday flea market last summer. They have a little old paper funk smell, but I love the way they look. I took one of the more distressed ones and trimmed it to fit on the front of the binder.

A small strip of eyelet punched black cardstock went on the left side of the cover. I then overlaid a strip of gaffer tape (cut slightly with pinking shears) on top of both cardstock and bingo card.

I used my black archival ink to stamp the phone image onto cream colored cardstock, and trimmed it out with my detail scissors. I trimmed a Jenni Bowlin ledger journaling spot and adhered it on top of the bingo card.

I set a Maya Road kraft journaling spot slightly to the middle right of the cover, to serve as a partial frame for my phone image. I adhered the phone, then added my "title" across the top of the phone, using a mix of Cosmo Cricket tiny type and Jenni Bowlin letter stickers.

The cover still seemed unbalanced, so I added a red Jenni Bowlin label sticker and some of my favorite tiny chartpak letters in red to say "My Phone Book."

To finish the cover, I added a few randomly punched stars and some more red chartpak letters/numbers to form a visual triangle. I trimmed the border from the scrap of unused bingo card and laid it down over the bottom of the phone to provide a visual anchor. A few strips of Sassafrass Lass stitched patterned paper helped add some dimension to the cover.

And here's the finished front cover again:

The back cover was easy peasy. I just covered most of it with some black cardstock, then added another strip of the pinked edged gaffer tape.

Now let's talk about the insides:

I covered the insides of the binder with black cardstock, trimmed as close to the "fold" of the covers as I could. I used a black paint to paint the area near the binder rings black, as well as to dab some black paint all around the edges of the entire book.

The inner chipboard pages were all covered with the mini 4x4 Jenni Bowlin papers (the same ones I used on this Minibook, which was also, strangely made this same time last year).

I only needed three sections for my book, so I used three 7Gypsies metal tags and attached them to the top. To get them to stick well, I used my Tombow tape runner on the part of the chipboard page where the tab was to rest, then I used the blunt part of my crop-o-dile to squeeze the tabs until they were very firmly stuck. The squeezing process left some unsightly dimples on the metal, so I covered them up using some strips of deco-punched cardstock.

I may go back and add some more of these to all the pages, but for right now, they are just on the pages with the tabs. I also may or may not go back and paint the edges of the inner pages black.. we'll see how I feel.

I covered the front of the tabs with some JB label stickers, and some chartpak numbers... the back sides were embellished with a small black star.

As far as the information that this book is going to hold, well, I'm planning on typing up the info onto some cheap white office supply labels (using my typewriter, of course), and just plonking them down into the appropriate section. If I need more pages, I'll use some lovely Hambly transparencies (less bulky).

Per Greg's suggestion I may also actually add tiny thumbnail photos of the people next to their contact info. I think it would make it much more like a scrapbook. :)
So that's my lovely project for this week... it felt good to get my hands on some paper again. I've been doing so much digi-work and photo editing that I was worried I'd forget how to use my scissors!

Now I just need to get myself together enough that I can start sending mail out to people. ;)

Hope you enjoyed the book!