I have attempted another new craft as the result of a swap on swap-bot.com.  The only requirement for this swap was that the item was to be tiny, because tiny things are inheriently cute.  The person I was to send my petite craft to leads a very busy life so I decided to make a little room that she could 'escape' to when she needed a break.
 

One of my new favorite crafts are envelope books.  I made several of these last month and gave them to family as Christmas gifts.  I got the idea from Martha Stewart, who got the idea from a book found at an antique store.  I mostly followed their pattern, but substituted a couple of items. 

For the base of the cover, I used cardboard from a box I had left over from moving.  I then covered it with patterned paper purchased from papermojo.com.  The instructions called for book binding tape to bind the envelopes to the cover; instead, I simply used ribbon and tacky glue. 

Even though I substituted some items with those a little less conventional, the results were still striking and well received from those that I gave them to. 


The envelope book shown here is one that I kept for myself.  I have a habit of looking through magazines and catalogs and finding inspirations for crafts and art.  I would snip these images and they would end up scattered all around with no rhyme or reason.  Now, I use my new envelope book to keep these scraps organized in labeled envelopes.  Now, when I'm feeling creative but need some inspiration, all I have to do is flip through the pages of my envelope book!