Fabric Wrapped Photo Albums

I am tired of looking at these ugly photo albums sitting on my shelf! I hated them so much I really just wanted to toss them out but I couldn’t get myself to do that with all my childhood pictures in them! I had a kind of “light bulb” moment the other day and decided that they needed to be wrapped in fabric. GENIUS ! Why have I not thought of this before?! Here’s the before/after:

So, Here’s how I did it.
I first went through and decided if there was anything I could get rid of. It’s amazing how organized you can get just by purging!! I threw out my old scrapbooks from High School and college. I know, I might be crazy. I put a lot of time and energy into those, but they were falling apart and getting junky and I have digital copies of those photos so it wasn’t too hard to part with them. Plus, there were lots of pages of me with ex boyfriends so who wants to look at those?! lol I also threw out a lot of prints from elementary/junior high/high school that I just didn’t care to keep.
I was able to narrow it down it the 4 binders I had and kept the 3 scrapbooks of stuff  from my childhood. Luckily, I had gone through those and condensed that stuff several years ago. I found a binder laying around the house that I put some other photo prints into and replaced the fabric wrapped one that I had. Remember when this was popular?

I vividly remember making this in Girls Scouts in elementary school. yikes! Needless to say I threw it out and replaced it with another binder.

All in all I ended up with 5 binders full of childhood prints from my birth to my wedding.

I went to Hobby Lobby and got some thick canvas material. I originally wanted Linen but it wasn’t thick enough to cover the patterns of the old binders.

I cut strips of the fabric just about an inch wider that the width and length of the binder

I then coated the outside with spray adhesive, flipped it over and laid it on the fabric

I did the binding first. I cut a tab out of the fabric and glued it down first using rubber cement.

P.S. Clothes pins work great for this and I feel like a genius for thinking of this! lol

I then went around to each edge and glued the fabric down with the spray adhesive, clipping it until it dried. The spray is nice because it dries really fast  but you have to be ready to glue and try not to make a mistake! I messed up on one binder and was able to pull it off so there is some give to it, but if you have the super permanent kind, it is not as forgiving!!

There you have it. Pretty, clean line and simplified binders that don’t look like ancient photo albums.
The best part is that this project only cost me about $10 for the fabric! (would have been cheaper but the lady at hobby lobby fought with me over the fabric being on sale. I know it was 30% off but sometimes a few bucks just isnt worth the argument)