Día Craft: Make Your Own Family Keepsake Book

This week, we continue our series on Día inspired crafts. These are literacy-based crafts that kids can put together. And these are fun activities that promote a reading culture at home. Today's craft comes from guest contributor and artist Denise Cortes, who originally wrote this for L4LL. If you enjoy this tutorial, check out her other one: DIY Book-Inspired Sports ID Tag.

We hope your children enjoy this tutorial for making their own DIY family keepsake. 

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Día de los Niños Craft: Bookmaking

My kids are really sentimental when it comes to family photos. One of our favorite things to do as a family is to thumb through their baby books and photo albums. We all laugh at the memories and by the end, I’m usually in tears. Why must childhood be so fleeting?

I wanted to teach my daughters how to make a DIY family keepsake book so they could collect photos, small notes and drawings, keeping alive the tradition of documenting our family.

This craft project is inexpensive and fun for everyone! 

Materials:

• Brown paper bags
• Scissors
• Decorative edge scissors
• Glue stick
• Patterned & solid color scrapbooking paper
• Black marker
• Jute twine or yarn

Directions:

What I love most about this project is we’re repurposing an inexpensive brown paper bag. It’s as simple as folding a bag or two in half, sandwiching them together, poking a few holes on one side and threading a piece of twine or ribbon to bind them together. After trimming one side with a pair of decorative edge scissors, you will have a “book” with pockets, similar to an accordion.



If you want to make the “book” thicker, use more than one paper bag. I used two, which allow me to have four pockets for sliding in photos and keepsakes.

To bind the paper bags together, make three holes along the edge that is opposite to the opening side.

Now you are ready to decorate your book. Find a few patterned sheets of scrapbooking squares. Cut them down to size so they can fit properly.



Glue down each piece of scrapbooking paper onto the “pages” of your book. Add a smaller piece of solid color paper and glue it on top of the scrapbooking paper, toward the bottom. This space is for any captions such as: My Family, Mama, Papa, Brother, Sister, Abuelita, etc. Remember, you are celebrating family!



The final step is to thread the book with a piece of jute twine, to bind all of the pages together. Be sure to tie a tight knot.

Now you can fill up your keepsake book with pictures, notes, and photo booth pictures!

Other Día Posts You May Enjoy:

• Ways To Celebrate Día de los Niños, Día de los Libros/Children's Day, Book Day
  
  
• 10 Ways to Celebrate Día at Home
  
  
• Día Craft: DIY Book Tutorial
  
  
• Día Craft: DIY Book-Inspired Sports ID Tag
  
  
• Día Craft: Music-Themed Magazine Holder
  
  
• Reading Challenge & Passport
  
  
• New Books to Celebrate Día
  
  
• Día de los Niños Activity Packet