Giveaway stuff; pretty pendant; covered binder

Well, Lupe won the giveaway because she was the only one who entered. LoL. So, good job, Lupe! ^_^ Those pics are later.

Here is an old, ugly binder I have that I got from Carol at clay guild about 1 year ago or so. I really needed a new binder and just decided to cover this one so that I could have a pretty one. Basically, I measured to just inside the place where the edge of the binder starts (you know, that dip and channel, kind of, where the plastic looks like it's been crimped). This binder happened to be about 11.25" tall and 9.25" wide and the spine was 13/16" wide.


Since I was in a rush and didn't feel like painting a border or anything, I chose a paper that would coordinate with the white edges left visible all around. I chose some beautiful paper from the DCWV Mariposa stack. I cut it to size, rounded the corners corresponding the open edges with a 1/4" rounder, inked the edges with Vintage Photo colored Distress Ink from Ranger, and glued it on with a fair amount of Scotch Quick Dry Adhesive. I lay the binder as shown in the picture above before gluing so that I could run a ruler firmly all over the paper to really spread the glue out underneath and adhere it well. I flipped it around for the back and ended up working on the back upside down. I applied the spine piece last. Instead of cutting out holes where the spine has the metal pieces, I just rubbed the paper rather roughly without glue over the spine so that the imprint of those metal pieces would get into the paper before gluing. I then glued the spine and rubbed again with a ruler to get it all smooth and well adhered.


So, there it is! Isn't it pretty!? It used only 2 sheets of 12x12 paper. Doing the math on this, it works out to about 42 cents a sheet (if you pay the full $20.00 for the paper pack) and only 21 cents each if you got it on sale for $9.99, which they seem to ALWAYS be on sale for. So you could potentially have a beautifully decorated binder for less than $2.00 (buying a super cheapo plain binder without a clear cover or anything... I'm not sure this would work out well on a clear cover binder).

AND.... on to the giveaway!


Lupe chose one of these beads from the picture of my jar and I decided to give her both. She also picked out this green pendant. For the heck of it, I'm throwing in this mokume gane rock purse I made. It's SO pretty!


And since I was in the mood for taking pictures of things from my jar, this is the gold fancy "mystery prize" I talked about when I said that I hadn't posted a pic of it yet, but a person could choose the gold pendant and it was really pretty. Lupe didn't pick this one, so it's back into the jar and maybe someone will pick it the next time I do a giveaway. Or I might take it to clay guild this weekend and put it in the raffle. I really love the way it turned out. ^_^