project #11: totally recycled photo album

So my friend Jacqui gave me 10 sheets of these sterile stickers that she rescued from the trash at the hospital in which she works. They were throwing them out because they were expired. What? Who knew that stickers could expire? But I guess it's because they're sterile? (Also they expired in Dec of 2001 so they were REALLY expired.) I thought it was kinda funny that these four tiny stickers had these huge cases, but what do I know about keeping things sterile? Apparently nothing.

I did like the official looking writing on the back though. Check it out! Now I know how to say "Sterilized on" in six different languages!

Now, remember how at the exchange I got a bunch of kids books so I could reassemble parts of them in other books? Well that's what I did for this one! I used the cover of a Sesame Street book for the cover of this book. I liked the great old-school pictures so I centered the cover around the images, and cut off all the title words as well as the bottom, since it had a missing corner.

Here you can see the inside front cover. Don't you LOVE those graphics? (Sorry about your head, Big Bird.) The stickers in the facing page are MIA because...

I put them on the back! I like how they look like a little bar-code or something. This is also a really good view of the binding. I did a variation of the Japanese stab binding but instead of using thread I used that phone wire I mentioned before. Granted, I didn't use any of the fun colors, just the dark gray one, but the cover on this one was just so bright that I needed something darker to ground it all. I think the curlie-cue ends make up in whimsy for what the wire lacks in color. Yes, that's right. I said whimsy.

Here you can see one of the pages with the stickers still in there. I thought about taking them all out, but what would I do with them all? I figured it would be more fun to leave them in their sleeves as a little extra gift for whoever buys the book. And, once the stickers are all gone, you can treat the empty pages as photo sleeves!

Sure, the photos would have to be a little smaller than traditional prints (about 3.25 x 5), but since we all have to go to a special effort to print our digital pictures out anyway, it wouldn't be that much more work to print them out at a custom size, right? Easy-peasey.

So, there you have it. A small photo album made entirely from recycled material. Books and recycling: two of my favorite things.