making mini albums

In honor of mini albums week over at Write. Click. Scrapbook. I thought I'd share a couple of my recent creations. I've made this fold-up album lots of times and I love how they turn out. I made this one for my friend Jody who came to visit me in April. I picked a bunch of random, but semi-matching, green patterned papers (very Oregon-y, I thought) and whipped this one up for her. It ends up being 6X6.

There are lots of different flaps that open up, so you have the front and back sides to decorate.

I did all the journaling on little strips that I cut out. Kept it very simple, mostly just labeling the places we went so she'd remember.

Ms. Lang, if you're reading this, act surprised when you get your mail in a couple of days.

The other one I thought I'd share was one I made for Phil for our recent 5th anniversary. I didn't want to just get him a card, even though I love Hallmark, I really wanted to give him something handmade. So I bought a blue slide-in photo album, had a 6X6 kit of coordinating papers that came with letter stickers, tags, and other little embellishments, raided my stash for brads, bought some flowers, ribbon and rickrack, and went to town. I worked on it in the evenings after he'd gone to bed. So it took maybe two or three nights at a couple of hours each to finish.

I used my cricut for the first and last page because I didn't think the letter stickers would be big enough.

I tried to come up with a word for each page, and then I journaled three lines. The one below has a picture of us on the beach and it says, "Walks on the beach, hand in hand, I love that." They all ended with "I love that."

I uploaded all the pictures to Costco, had them printed in black and white with a textured white border. I didn't worry about picture placement either, some were facing the same directions, other times they weren't.

I also experimented a little bit with making my own chipboard pieces. I used a piece that came out of something I bought from Creative Memories, drew the shapes I wanted, and cut them out by hand. Then I covered them with patterned paper and sanded the edges a bit. (And yes, Glenda, I have one of those annoying noisy little eyelet setters too.)

Meanwhile, the rest of my scrapbooks are somewhere around two years behind, but that's ok, because there are some people I know (and I won't mention any names) that haven't hardly touched their stuff since I moved out here.