Every Tuesday, Captured Moments offers a Make & Take project at the store. These projects are designed to inspire new ideas or introduce a new technique or tool of the trade. As someone who has to create a new and exciting Make & Take project every week, I am forever on the look-out for anything that might inspire me. Of course, like many other people, I check out other web-sites, trade magazines, and catalogs that might offer an idea or two, but, when all else fails… I take a ride to the local dollar store! You never know what you might find there and if you do find something that inspires you, chances are, it will cost a dollar! We found a great little travel book, kind of a travel “brag” book that just cried out, “Scrap me up and make me beautiful!”

Altered Travel Album, a great find at a dollar store

The Photo Album itself, is basically left untouched on the outside. It’s cover depicts an Old World-type map design. Besides using the cover photo window to add a Travel quote and some additional embellishments, most of the altering is done on the inner pages.

One of the inner pages, covered with travel themed papers

Another really great thing about these type of “altered” projects is that it’s a great way to use up some of your left over embellishments and scrap paper. What we did to this album was cover the inside pages (blank pages) with travel themed scrap papers and them jazz them up with travel stickers, words and photo mats.

Some of the inner pages of the altered travel book

Even the ribbon on the binding of the album came with the book… this was really a dollar store gem! Dollar stores are great for finding cheap photo frames, photo albums, and other small, “scrappable” items. Next time you visit a dollar store, look around for fun things you can be inspired to make better!

This week’s Make & Take project is also a great dollar store find… a very cool wooden photo frame! I will add another blog entry that showcases the frame project as well… stay tuned!

Tara