Organize Seed Packets in a Photo Album

Organize Seed Packets in a Photo Album

The clear plastic pockets inside a photo album are great for organizing seeds into. Providing that the packets aren’t too thick, you can slide them in and out easily and the clear plastic makes them easy to browse. If you have a lot of seeds, you could even have seed albums for salad crops, herbs, roots, brassicas, etc.

This tutorial shows how to recover an old photo album in fabric so that it’s a just a little bit prettier. You could of course omit this step though and just store your seeds in a ready-made album.

The Fabric

To start the project I purchased a ‘Fat Quarter’ of fabric, which turned out to be far more than I needed. To fix the fabric to the album covers I used ordinary spray mount though I’m sure any glue that’s suitable for both cloth and paper will do. In all, the project took about half an hour and I’m pretty excited with how the new seed book looks.

I think that an ordinary album might be trickier to use for this project because seed packets are thick when stacked one on top the other. Using a spiral bound album is far more practical when creating a seed album since it can help create space.

Spiral Binding

The trickiest part of the project for me was deciding how to approach covering the line of holes along the spine. In the end I decided to forget trying to cover them at all since it seemed like a mission and the chances of the fabric fraying around the holes is pretty high.

My solution was to turn the front and back sides of the album covers inside out so that the Cheetah design faced inwards and the visible part of the spine was black. Running the fabric right up to the holes but not covering them worked well and I was relieved to skip the ordeal of cutting out and pinning back fabric for every single hole. Though of course, carry on if you’d prefer to do so.

Step 2: Cut two pieces of fabric – one for each of the covers. Leave an extra 2-4cm of margin for the top, bottom and one of the sides. I only used 2cm in this project since I’m trying to save as much of the remaining fabric for another idea but I’d recommend a little bit more to make things easier. You’ll also notice that the edges of the fabric below are zigzag.

This is because I cut the fabric with pinking shears which can help minimise fraying at the edges. Though to be honest I don’t think it’s a big deal if you cut the fabric this way or just with ordinary scissors.