DIY Wedding Card Book

Since it feels like spring outside, even though it's clearly still winter, I've been getting bit by the cleaning bug. If the weather holds up, no room in our house will be spared from my organizational conquest. Right now I'm tackling the office, which is a big job. Somehow, in less than three months, it has become our catch-all room and has piles of crap everywhere. Most of it is wedding stuff that I either need to toss or find a home for. Our wedding cards were a part of this collection. As I contemplated filing them in my circular filing cabinet, I decided that I would probably regret doing so in the future, so for now at least, I wanted to hang on to them. I guess I could have just put them in a box or something simple, but I saw an idea for a wedding card book on this website and decided to make my own. Why not? The idea on the blog was pretty involved since it was created by a wedding crafting diva. Let's be real, I'm far from a professional crafter, so I simplified it majorly to make my version. Here's what I did:

Materials:
- Fabric scrap
- Two pieces of cardstock
- Wedding cards
- Ribbon left over from my wedding invitations
- Red yarn
- Hole punch
- Leaves made from cardstock left over from our place cards
- Gold Sharpie
- Tacky glue (Let me tell you all how much I HATE tacky glue, but it works so stinkin' great!)
- Quiescent Baby Bear (napping)

1. I sorted through the cards and found the largest and smallest cards that I wanted to include. I measured the largest card and cut two pieces of cardstock to be just a few millimeters larger than the card on each side. These will be front and back cover pieces.
2. Using a fabric scrap that coordinated well with our fall colored wedding, I cut it to the same size as the cardstock and used tacky glue to affix it to the piece that was to be the front cover.
3. For the back cover, I glued leftover leaves on the inside portion to decorate it, keeping a red leaf off to the side to attach over the ribbon closure last.
4. After the cover dried, I traced a "D" and an "E" onto leaves and glued them onto the fabric, and wrote our wedding date and "The Best is Yet To Come..." on another leaf and attached it to the lower portion of the cover. Our first dance was to Frank Sinatra's "The Best is Yet To Come" so it seemed appropriate.
5. Using the smallest card, I adjusted my three-hole punch so that only two holes would be punched in each card. You have to measure using the smallest card so that the holes will be close enough together to accommodate all of the different sizes. I then centered the holes on each card edge and punched them. Let me tell you, this was a task. Who's idea was it to make three-hole punches so thin, or to make wedding cards so thick?! I had to improvise holes on a few cards that wouldn't fit into the punch.
6. Using red yarn, I threaded the string from the back cover, all of the way through the stack of cards using the top holes, across the front cover and back through the bottom holes. I tied the yarn in a simple knot and cut off the ends. This will serve as a binding, so pull it tight, but not so tight that the cards can't turn since that would defeat the purpose of making the book...

7. I have a plethora of leftover ribbon from invites, decorations, etc. from our wedding, so I cut two pieces, one green and one brown and glued their overlapped middles to the back cover. Then I glued that extra red leaf over top of the ribbon for aesthetics and extra hold. Pull the ribbon carefully around the edges of the book and tie in a bow in the center of the cover.

Easy project that I was able to complete using materials that I had on hand. And now the hubs and I can save our wedding cards forever :) (I'm sure he'll be thrilled, haha)

And yes, I should be doing practice math problems for the GRE instead of making stuff, but everyone needs a study break, right?