Country Sign In Book

I have looked everywhere to find a sign-in book for Bridgett's shower (if you can't tell already I'm the head hostess). I know that she can use her baby book, but it's a Pooh book and we've been looking for a western one and I don't want all these signatures to be in a Pooh book if she finds a western one she likes and wants to switch all of her stuff over. Anyhow - the point of the matter is - it's almost impossible to find a western/country guest book or baby book that is less than $100 and I think that is just ridiculous so I decided that I would just make my own.

I started out with this little brown (cardboard like) book, filled with brown (butcher paper like) paper. It was tied with a cream colored ribbon and showed a multitude of potential!

I took the ribbon off and the paper out (its just secured in there with the ribbon), and started with the cover...

I started with some blue jean scrapbook and some spray adhesive glue. I spray glued the inside cover of the book, lined up the paper and then pressed it down to smooth it out.

I pulled the paper tightly (to avoid wrinkles) and folded it over onto the front, sprayed the front cover and smoothed the paper out.

This is what it looked like when I finished that. I did the same thing with the back cover.

This is what it looked like when I got finished covering it. I needed to punch holes in the scrapbook paper so that I could thread the ribbon back through, so I used my Xacto knife to punch little tiny holes where the old holes used to be.

Then I dug through all of my stuff, until I found these eyelets. I used the dark silver ones, and centered them over the tiny little holes I left myself.

To set eyelets you need a small (scrapbooking) hammer and an eyelet setter.

You position the eyelet where you want it to be, and hammer it down. Make sure you have something underneath your project. I use a mat so that it isn't as loud.

As you hammer, the eyelet buries itself and the base of it starts to open up which secures itself.

This is what it looked like when I had both eyelets set.

All four of them set.

I decided to forego the ribbon and use some of the rafia that I had left over from the nursery letters. The rafia was hard to thread - I had to do it piece by piece.

Before I tied it all up and called it a day - I decided that I didn't like the plain pages the way that they were - they hung a little past the cover, so I got out my corner punch and went through and punched all of the corners off of the pages, to make them rounded.

This is how all of the pages look now - I like it much better.

This is currently what I have for the sign-in book. I like it much better than what I started with. I think it goes well with her theme and will coordinate really well with the decor of the shower.

I'm not completely finished - I still have some more ideas for it. I'll post more if I ever get around to doing anything else with it!