Album Covers

Sisters, 1980s

Readers of a certain age will remember the Rolodex. Danish engineer Hildaur Neilsen invented the rotating business contact holder for a stationery manufacturer in New York in 1958.

In 2015, American Craft designer Heide Swapp put her own spin on the Rolodex, and the crafting world went wild. She calls it a Memorydex. Instead of rotating boring contacts, you create, store, and rotate memories. Heide Swapp’s Memorydex is taller, and as luck would have it, about the same size as a cassette tape cover.

Packaging photo: copyright Heidi Swapp

You’ll also have to be a reader of a certain age to remember cassette tapes which peaked in the 1980s. My sister Sharon and I spent our twenties in that decade. Music cassette tapes were the thing. You could play them on a cassette player, in your car, or risk arrest by broadcasting your favorite artist on a Boombox.

Cassettes gave way to CD’s and now you can store your entire music collection on a computer hard drive or in the cloud. Nostalgia is another thing. Sharon stopped listening to her cassettes long ago, but the album art had meaning. When Sharon moved last year, she asked me to help her save all the covers.

I took it one step further and created a Memorydex cassette tape album cover archive. I’ve had so much fun. With a few tips from my friend Kelly, a crafter extraordinaire, I bought a punch

Memorydex Dies

and a pair of dies.

Memorydex Dies

I’m off my feet for six weeks after major foot surgery, so it’s been the perfect craft-from-the-couch project.

I created a gallery documenting the various steps. There are three styles of cassette covers including paper, cardboard, and multiple-fold. Here are the various steps (click on individual photos for details):

Classic cover, one sided paper

This is all that gets tossed after the precision-cut

Cardboard cover with seam

Cardboard cover opened

Punched cardboard cover

Another cover

Several cassette covers have multiple folds. These were punched at the bottom and folded to fit

Punched cassette cover

Assorted cassette covers in Memorydex

The collection

Alphabetized

In addition to Sharon’s purchased music library, I included covers from various mix-tapes, her voice lessons, and a few random blank tapes. For a bit of added trivia, Sharon worked at Memorex in Santa Clara while attending college. There are one or two Memorex tapes in the mix as well. Sharon is thrilled with the results and I had a great time making this for her.