Alphabetica Album Cover

We have already started our Alphabetica album Round Robin. For this project we keep our albums at home and participating artists send the pages to us. Every month we swap partners and make pages for each other. We're all working in the 5 ring, 8 x 8 7Gypsies album to make things easier.

I had managed to make my own A and B pages but the album looked really bare without a front cover and I thought I would rectify that, specially as Alphastamps produces such gorgeous ABC Books collage sheets.

I selected a furnishing fabric for my background. Conveniently it was divided into little rectangles already which were green velvet on a ivory ground. I layered this up with batting (wadding in U.S.) and machine quilted it with green metallic thread along the straight lines both vertically and horizontally.

I stamped The Alphabet (from Alphastamps) on a piece of hand-painted cotton, using green Fabrico (now called Versacraft) ink and heat-setting it by ironing. This was stitched onto the background in the top left corner and I went around it 3 times straight stitching with the sewing machine. I added the fabric images in the top right (from Alphastamps ABC Books#3 collage sheet) and bottom left (from Alphastamps ABC Books #2 fabric sheet). In the centre I added the large ABC (also from ABC books #3) and to the side of this the smaller ABC (from ABC Books #2 again). Have a good look at the picture to see the various position. I've simply stitched these on using a straight stitch and green metallic thread.

I stamped the letters of the alphabet (from AS The Alphabet sheet) onto a transparency sheet using black Staz-On ink and I overlaid this in the centre of the spread, again by stitching. Have a look at the detailed picture of this section above.

Finally I added a glitter A , three black A, B and C and 3 large ABC letters by glueing them on.(with Judikins Diamond Glaze) The large letters were blanks which I coloured using Golden liquid acrylic paints. All the letters are from Doodlebugs. I added Diamond Glaze to the top of all the letters apart from the glittery one.

A vintage trim was added at the bottom and a green eyelash yarn was stitched to the other three sides. Finally I added gold beads around the edges of two of the images and green ones at the top of the trim.

Still the inside front page and back of the album to do but at least it now looks like a proper album ready to receive new pages!