Posted 2025 January 20
After seeing this Den of Angels post about making printable vinyl record sleeves, I really wanted to make my own. In their post, they bought 3D-printed vinyl records for the sleeves, but I decided to make them out of cardboard and sticker paper myself. This way, I could also customize the vinyl style beyond just basic black ones, and pick whatever I wanted for the centre piece art. The only downside is that if I ever buy the Tiny Turntable, I can't place the records on it, because there's no centre hole.
For the album sleeves, I used the same template as the Den of Angels poster, upscaled so that one A4 letter paper held 3 sleeves, which was what they suggested for SD scaled dolls. The first one I put together was a Nirvana compilation album!
With the records, I for the most part did not use the actual vinyl designs of the real albums. Instead, I used the website Coloured Vinyl Records to find pretty vinyls of specific colours (mostly grey and black), and then put the original vinyl center stickers onto the coloured vinyls I had chosen for each album. I actually ended up with only two normal black vinyls, and one plain red. The rest are mixed colours.
I tried my best to pick vinyl colours and designs that matched the theme and aesthetic of the album covers, even when they were very different from the original vinyl. One vinyl was originally green, and I changed it to a red and grey mix instead, because the album cover was red.
The back side of the sleeve and record
All of the album sleeves have a back and front based on their real sleeves for those album's vinyl record releases.
For albums that didn't have any vinyl releases, I usually used the back of a CD case or other promo media and cropped or edited it to match the album cover.
I made four sets of three; 12 total records, although I didn't end up printing all of them.
Once I had everything designed and templated, I printed the sleeves onto cardstock, cut them out, and glued them into place.
The actual vinyls themselves was a more involved process.
I had to arrange the records so that each vinyl printed twice, and one side of the pair had to have a ring around it to cover the edge of the cardboard it would be stuck to. I cut out cardboard circles the same size as the records, and printed all the vinyls onto sheets of sticker paper. The edges of the vinyls with the ring would be folded over the edge after aligning it to a cardboard circle, and then the non-ring version would go on the reverse side to cover the folded over edge. I did it this way to avoid having raw cardboard edges showing. For a more realistic look, I also compressed the edges down a bit with my fingers so it looked like a tapered edge.
All materials cut out!
Clip the edges and fold...
All done!
Here's all the vinyls I made in the end! I tried to stick to a general colour scheme of white, black, grey, and red.
I'm planning on using these for a punk-ish, music-y style of doll photoshoot, where the outfits would be mostly in this monochrome colour scheme — I was thinking of doing some kind of small room box with a black red and white colour scheme and some punk-rock or J-fashion inspired decor, for when I get vinyl Rivel. I'd probably put the records on a little shelf and also have some laying around. Maybe a guitar too? I have no clue where to get one in 1/3 scale though unfortunately.
I'm really happy with how the records came out, though, and I kinda feel tempted to make more...but that would be a waste of printer ink!
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