A special mini book.

Remember my cousin Natalie?  Back in May of this year, she was on death’s doorstep.  She was in a drug-induced coma and on life support for about a month, hanging on for dear life, and during that time the doctors told our family not to expect her to make it.  Every day and every week that passed, they were amazed that she was still hanging on.  The girl has got a fighting spirit, that’s for sure.  Today, other than having pneumonia twice since, she says she feels just like she did before, like she never got sick at all.  But back in those dark days when we all prayed for her recovery, tons of people left her messages on the CarePages website that her aunt set up for her through the hospital.  People she loved, her family, her friends, total strangers reached out to her and talked to her through those messages, typed up good wishes and prayers for her.  And her aunt updated it every single day with Natalie’s status, any tiny bit of improvement, and kept us all informed.  Natalie, of course, doesn’t remember those days, and I wanted her to have a record of that outpouring of love and support.  I wanted her to see and feel that she is LOVED and never forget it.  I wanted her to know how close she was to no longer being on this earth and appreciate every day that she has.  I wanted to give her something that she could show her future daughter someday and tell her the story about how her mommy is a walking MIRACLE and show her the goodness and kindness of people, even total strangers, who wrote her messages. 

So I took all of those messages from that website and all the updates her aunt posted on there every day and I copied and pasted for DAYS, putting those into a Word document and then sizing them down to 5×7 and printing them out on my printer.  It was rough, people.  I screwed it up the first time, realized I had put the messages in the wrong order, had to throw it away and print them all over again.  It nearly brought me to tears!  But I made it through and used my Bind-It-All machine to punch holes in all the pages.  The book ended up being 3 inches thick.  I called several printing places to see about having it spiral bound, and nobody had a spiral that large.  At this point I just had to laugh because it couldn’t get any worse with this project.  I ended up splitting the book into TWO books, which meant that I then had to make covers for the second book.  In an ideal world, I would have used the same paper and made them matchy-matchy, but I do not live in an ideal world (I live in crazyland), so I just MADE IT WORK.  ha ha

Anyway, and now here I am sharing with you these wonderful books.  I hope that Natalie reads them and cherishes them and lets them remind her how lucky she is and how loved she is.

(inside front cover in photo above).  This is where I was cursing Zip Dry paper glue or whatever the hell it’s called.  I keep hearing how fabulous this glue is and I must just say here that I HATE it. 

I have this problem where I am just physically incapable of making a mini book without tying something, some little trinket, SOMEthing to the spine of it, so I dug this out of a drawer and I think it’s perfect!

That first page is where I put the very first entry that Natalie’s aunt put on the website, which is the story of how she got to the hospital in the first place, how she was sick with what they thought was the flu and the doctors at the clinic sent her home, how a few days later she went to the ER and was again sent home, how she then developed a fever and wound up in the hospital in ICU, how she crashed and nearly died, was put on life support and flown to the next hospital, and how the doctors there said she was in very grave condition.  I really wanted that page to stand out because it’s the beginning of the story and really speaks to how serious Natalie’s condition was (and shows how far she has come now), so I printed it onto a transparency and then painted the back of the transparency hot pink.  It gives the page a different feel than the rest of the pages.

Here’s the second book that isn’t matchy-matchy but I almost like it better than the first one anyway, so I’m good with it. 

This is an old book page given to my by my friend Abby.  I’ve been holding onto it for the perfect project, and I found it.  The words are a rub-on.

It KILLED me that I couldn’t find anything appropriate in my stash to tie onto the spine of the second book!  But I called it done and sent it on its way.

Those jewels I used are self-adhesive and my new favorite thing EVER.  They are Basic Grey Bling-It.  I LOVE these.

This project was my first time using a mask, and on both the book covers (front and back) I used the Heidi Swapp butterfly mini masks, having no idea what I was doing.  But I think I did a pretty good job and I’m pleased with how they look and can’t wait to use them again on something else! 

Does anyone know how long these masks last?  I’d love it if you’d leave me a comment if you have any idea.