pocket page: February 2019 part 3

In snippets of time over the past couple of weeks, in between homeschooling and physical therapy, I have been putting together more of the February pocket pages for my 2019 “everyday” album. When I have to do things in such small increments of free time, I find myself especially thankful for my pre-planning system and detailed captions in the metadata of my photos.

For this page, as for the other February pages, I’m using a stash kit inspired by Victoria Marie’s January crop and the scrapbook.com January Instagram challenge. That kit is made up of some pretty old items: a BasicGrey collection kit (“Highline” from 2014), stickers from an Echo Park collection kit (“Head over Heels,” introduced at the end of 2013), and some metal embossed charms and photo corner embellishments from Making Memories that predate the previous supplies by at least several years! I really wanted to get these things onto pages and into my albums instead of languishing in my stash. However, for this page, I also tried to include some newer items to meet the “Old+New Challenge” for the Victoria Marie crop.

The challenge here for me was actually finding *new* products! I don’t buy a lot of supplies, and when I have in recent months, they have been for very specific projects–that aren’t this one! haha. I hope it’s okay that I stretched the challenge to include new-to-me items: a manual die-cut machine(!!!! I’ve been wanting one for so long, and I’m so grateful to a neighbor in our local Buy-Nothing group for giving one to me!!!!), a cloud embossing folder by Darice (that same kind neighbor also gave me some embossing folders with the machine), the Elle’s Studio “MINI Dated” stamps I purchased with the intent of using them in this album and had never opened until this last week, and a set of Shimelle “Head in the Clouds” stamps that I purchased for my Disney 2016 album but broke open for the first time to use on this layout. Does it also count that I used a new trimmer that my parents gave me for Christmas?

At the top left of this layout, I included an envelope to hold some valentine notes from my children and Husband. I wanted it to exactly fit that 4″x6″ pocket, and I wanted to use my envelope board.

After a quick internet search, I discovered that there is an app called “Envelope Generator” from American Crafts to generate the paper size and board marking for any card size (in 1/8″ increments). It doesn’t have an option to calculate backward from the finished envelope size, so I had to do quite a few tests on scrap paper to determine the parameters… but it didn’t take me too long to figure them out. Here they are (for those keeping score, this corresponds to a card size of 5 5/8″ by 3 5/8″ in the app):

For an envelope to fit in a 4″x6″ pocket:
use paper size 7.75″ square and the punch guide marking at 3.25″