Graduation Gift

It's that time of year and you may be thinking about graduation gifts.  Here's a fairly simple idea that makes a great gift for your favorite grad.  Make him or her a mini-scrapbook in the school colors to hold those graduation photos! 

These are really quite easy.  You can find a lot of tutorials on-line, though they go by a variety of names.  Here are some of them:

• Make a conertina book
• Make a folding chipboard album
• Make a diamond fold book
• Make a squash book (this one has a video tutorial)
• Another squash book
• A third squash book
• Yet another squash book tutorial
• Make an explosion book
• Explosion book video

I made mine using three 12x12 sheets of paper folded as shown in the tutorials to make pages that are 6 x 6. I made the covers a bit bigger - 6 1/4 x 6 1/4 or so. I cut mine from old school notebook covers (so they were nice & sturdy) & then covered them with decorative paper before gluing them to the book.

The picture above shows the front cover.  Here are some pictures showing the inside:

Note that pictures can go on both the front and back sides of this little photo album (the back side shows the covers as well), so there are quite a few spots for pictures, even with only 3 sheets of 12 x 12 card stock used.  Note also, that when I made the covers, I glued pieces of ribbon at the front corner, allowing for the book to be tied shut.