Lovely Child's Picture Keepsake

My brother and his wife are expecting their first baby fairly soon and were given a shower this past Saturday.  I wasn't able to make it (they live about 8 hours away) but wanted to contribute, so I volunteered to make some party favors and a "wishes for baby" album.  I'm not sure where those originated but I got the questions for mine off of this website.   

I found a generic and pretty plain, but nicely purple, photo album at Michael's for only $1.75.  I was just going to keep it purple since they are having a girl, BUT it was, like I said, pretty plain and the party theme was vintage and books - or something like that and this purple wasn't vintage or, other than it's shape, bookish.

See, plain purple.

I peeled away the seams of the black cover paper on the inside of the photo book to get ready to put the fabric there and still be able to have a nice finish after.

Covered my space and the window of the photo book with newspaper and sprayed it with Elmer's craft spray glue.

This toile fabric was leftover from some projects in my daughter's room.  I found the picture I wanted and placed that portion of it on the front.  I didn't picture it, but unfortunately, if I had of just smoothed the fabric out onto the back of the book too, the back wouldn't have had a picture centered on it.  I'm kind of particular and didn't have a clue as to how I was going to get a picture centered on the back and the front without some sewing (which I didn't want to do).  More on that in pictures below.

After I got the front and the back centered, I cut a bit more fabric off so it would fit nicely under the black fabric that originated in the book. 

Folding the corner and putting the black fabric back into place.

Glued the black fabric into place.

Here was another part that took some thought; how to get the fabric to tuck in nicely into the window.  The backside of a craft knife worked great!

Almost finished...but do you see that uneven piece of fabric sticking out on the left side at the bottom? That is the flap of excess fabric from the side.  To get the back to have a picture centered on it, I folded a small amount of fabric on the binding (seen below).  Sewing it would probably have been the best option but time and laziness necessitated use of the glue gun yet again.

But the flap didn't look right, so I placed a button on.  I wanted 3, but I only had 2 of the green in the toile and one of the tan buttons.  It turned out nice anyway.