Not quite a mini album!

Hello, my name is Megan Black, I am one of the lucky girls who get to be on this wonderful DT!  I am a mixed media artisan who started with art journals and cardmaking and moved onto lots of other things including scrapbooking.  I simply love techniques and I am an absolute product junky!!! I have been blessed to have some very fine teachers. I hope that I can share with you some of the beautiful techniques and some of the hot tips I have picked up, and we can inspire and encourage each other along the way.  I would love you to see more of my work and catch up with me, you can do this HERE at my blog.
I was sent by Suzanne a great mini album in the shape of a camera. How delicious! I was thinking of the photography my eldest son has been dabbling in since we have been in the bush and was going to create an album showing off some of his fave pics. However, Necessity has a lot to answer for: Not only is she the mother of all invention but she seems to be a very close aunt to the creative flow in this house!! Before I left Perth I had a stack of photos printed (got confused with Newman and the South Pole. We actually do get mail up here, LOL) and they were living unhappily in a cupboard, all dishevelled and out of reach. Not a good place at all! So with the large mdf mini album I have created a photo box.
You need to have a box, or in my case spend all day making a box, that fits snugly behind the album pages!  Next, I painted and covered the album pages with paper and then inked and coloured the edges of the pages.  For my front I decided I wanted a "real" camera quality to it, so I used black Ultra Think Embossing Enamel.  I gave the "front" page a light dabbing of embossing ink and then sprinkled UTEE over the surface and melted it with my heat gun.  While the enamel was still molten I poured over more grains and kept heating/melting, continuing this in patches until I got the desired thickness and look.  I attached this piece to one of the other pages for a back and filled the "lens" and "flash" with pva glue and sprinkled mica flakes in them, letting it dry and shaking off the excess.  I love the look of heat embossing and I think it has a great wow factor (pardon the pun), with such little effort!

After this I simply embellished the front with some pictures from Tim Holtz paper, created a title with rub-ons and some old journal paper.  I have left it quite light on for embellishments as I know this is going to get well handled.  I used a gloss gel medium to "decoupage" my images onto the front.  The gloss gel medium is lovely when working with vintage images as it is not as glossy as Dimensional Magic or Glossy Accents but gives more a soft shiny satin appearance.

I used my Dremel to create slots in one of the pages to place over the box and use as a divider.  That's the great thing about the WOW chipboard, it's sturdy and strong but light enough to cut and manipulate easily into anything you can imagine!

Thank you so much for taking the time to visit us at the WOW DT blog, have a wonderfully creative time between now and then!
Megan B x