thrifty photo book

After my laptop was stolen a couple of years ago and just about every picture I had was instantly gone, I decided that I needed to do two things.  The first was to back up all of my photos on Flickr.  If I don't want to share them, I can always change the privacy settings.  The second thing was to  have more photos printed.  I thought it would be pretty expensive, but I was surprised to find that depending on the special of the week at Walgreens, you can get 100 4" x 6" photos for around $10 or less.  And if you have a lot of square photos like I do, you can fit multiple smaller pictures per print with a little help from Photoshop.  It can be crazy the amount of little pictures you can get at one time if you are willing to cut them apart yourself, which I totally am.

Lately I've been looking for books to hold all of these photos at thrift stores, and when I saw this 4-ring ledger for maybe 50 cents I knew I could use it.  

before

I am trying to find the perfect picture for the front to cover up the word "executive", but for now the big letter stickers get the point across.  The gray and white marbled paper inside really had to go.  I had printed out some of my granny square mosaics a while back that were perfect for covering it up.

For the inside I made 5 x 8 pages mostly of scraps of paper, original pages from the ledger, and some paint chips I have been collecting.  I was able to fit about 100 pictures on these 22 pages, but I still have hundreds left over.  I see more photo books in my future, but first I need to get some more glue.