Bye Baby - Bunting

It's my daughter's 18th birthday today.

I made her a card to celebrate all her birthdays as she is due to leave home soon to go to university.

The tags for each year can be detached from the accordion style card and are strung together so they form bunting. Added decorative loveliness!

Now, this is not my idea.  I saw a lovely card on the blog Jennifer Grace Creates which Jennifer designed for her sister's 21st birthday.  I thought it was a brilliant idea and was inspired to try to make my own.  Here's what I did.

First I assembled all the materials I needed: photos, blank cards, pre-cut tags, coloured card, string, glue, scissors double sided tape and my trusty guillotine.  For decoration I used a star punch, printed numbers and strips cut from wrapping paper.  I selected photos at home, saved them to a memory stick and printed them at as 2" x 3" mini-prints at the kiosk at my local Tesco supermarket.

 I glued the photos onto the tags.  I then glued the blank cards together, back to back, so there was a page for each year.  This also helped to strengthen the card booklet.

When I decided to add her age to each tag, I looked to the internet for some free printables.  These numbers were created for a design project to make your own advent calendar and come from the lifestyle blog by queen of organisation, Abby Lawson, called Justagirlandherblog.  I printed the numbers onto A5 paper so they were the right size for me.  Thanks, Abby, for sharing this really useful resource!

I then made a pocket for each page so the tags would fit into the card.  I cut these out of different coloured card (as the red, white and green was making it look a bit too Christmassy!).

The pockets are fixed to the card using double sided tape on three sides.  I found that the backing is sometimes hard to remove from the tape but tweezers helped!

Once the pockets were all fixed in, I decorated each one with a strip cut from wrapping paper and placed stars punched from the off-cut coloured card around the tags.

So far, so good but I realised that the card looked rather bare once the bunting is removed.  I typed up a few memories about each birthday, printed these onto paper and attached them behind the tags so they're only visible when the bunting is up.

I added my most recent photo to the front cover and attached a piece of string under it so the card can be closed.

The button on the back allows the string to fasten around the card.  I got my husband to write the personal message as he's good with words.

It only remained to string the tags together to make the bunting.

There you have it - a birthday card, party decoration and memory book all in one and I got to relive all these happy annual milestones whilst I was making it - and smile!