I would have posted this on Sunday, but you know...I was being lazy instead.
So, you remember the summer road trip to Memphis, Chicago, Milwaukee, and St. Louis? I now present its mini album.
Click on the new gallery at the right.
This came together in several steps. When I ordered my photos, I decided to do a separate album for our day trip to Chicago but leave in our dinner stop en route to Milwaukee. I also decided to take out all of the family Milwaukee shots and just leave the touristy things in the road trip album. I ordered duplicate prints of some of my favorites so I can scrap them again on regular pages later.
When I saw how many photos and memorabilia I had, I decided to use a ring album so I could fit more stuff. I found this album with divider tabs which was perfect to segregate each section of the trip by city.
I used the same line of paper and embellishments for the whole album. In fact, I bought them all last year when we decided to do a road trip, and I set everything aside until now. This made matching colors and patterns fool-proof. And since I knew I'd have photos and ephemera of all different colors, I knew I didn't want to try to match my papers to the trip. (Since the Chicago album was only the span of one day, I did match the paper colors to our outfits and consider scenery colors.) I put the embellishments aside and cut several papers to my mini album size (3.5"x6.5").
I divided my photos into stacks per city. I kept everything chronological. I cropped one photo at a time and decided if I wanted to adhere it to patterned paper or attach another photo to it. I worked with two photos at a time so I could make sure punching holes wouldn't ruin the photos. If it did, I'd reverse the photo order to turn it 180 degrees or I'd give up on pairing them and leave the back side blank. I worked through the whole album this way.
Once I had the photos cropped, adhered, and punched, I added all of the business cards, tags, and other items from the trip. I often staggered these and the photos so that they were punched through the top two holes or bottom two holes, but not every item is 3.5"x6.5".
I made another pass for the journaling. I wrote in the margins, on the back of the cards, on travel tags, and added a few extra inserts for more space.
Last pass was to add flowers, stamps, and tags. I ran out of stamps, so I cut small rectangles out of patterned paper, inked the edges, and used a hole punch on the four corners.
I usually like to do the cover first so that it kind of sets the tone for the rest of the album, plus I like to make sure my best supplies are available and not used up throughout the book. I had to do this one in a few pieces since I didn't have all of my supplies with me, but I still had an idea of what I wanted. I lined the inside covers with patterned paper, sanded and inked the edges. I like the plain kraft cover (and it looks great with the pink paint), so I didn't want to cover up too much or put patterned paper on the cover. I drew light pencil lines as a guide for my title and stamped the letters and numbers with acrylic paint. I knew I wanted to use fabric tape on the spine but didn't know how wide it would be, so I lined up my title on the right margin instead of centering it.
I finished the cover with some fabric tape. It has adhesive on one side, but the adhesive wasn't holding up to the corners, so I glued the tape down with Glossy Accents. The striped tape is actually two pieces side by side. I used the green dots to overlap the stripes, and the brown dots to overlap that. I tucked the ends under and again glued with Glossy Accents. The final touch was the ribbon threaded through the rings and tied in a knot across the spine. It's the same ribbon I used inside the album for the journal cards.
And there you have it. The long-winded description of how I made this album. ; )
