How many un-scrapped vacations do you have?
Yeah.
I really don’t mean to initiate a state of guilt. Most of my vacations are unscrapped, too, so I’m right there with you.
But this summer we took our biggest vacation ever, and guess what? I actually made the mini-album! I made it within a few weeks of returning home, and I’m going to share a few secrets for how to turn your vacation memories into a giant mini-album in a very short amount of time.
1. Start with the foundations.
Don’t complete each page at a time. You’ll start off ambitious, have a few spectacularly amazing first pages, and then you’ll never finish. Either that, or all the remaining pages will be suddenly simple compared to those first ones.
Instead, quickly make a bunch of foundations for pages, then go back and add the photos (although sometimes the foundations pages ARE the photos).
Your ephemera can be foundations too. Don’t worry about the embellishments, journaling, or other detailing yet.
To me this is the funnest part because we get to come up with ingenious ways to solve the dilemmas of how to display the vacation stuff in an interesting way.
Pamphlets…
Here I made an 8×10 photo fit into my 8×8 album…
And here I turned an amusement park map into a fold-out page…
2. Hold off on the embellishments and other details until after all the photos are on pages.
I know, we get so excited about the embellishments. But they are a common cause of overwhelm. If you wait until all your photos are down on page foundations, you can now assess your book with a good honest reality check.
How much time or motivation do you have left for lots of embellishing? If you’re getting tired of your project at this point, or if you have other things you need to do, you can decide to add embellishments sparingly. You’ll have a nice consistent album, front to back.
If you’re still excited and still have lots of time, you can go to town with your embellishments.
I demonstrated how to make that flower embellishment out of patterned paper in Paperclipping 178 – Transform Old Products Into Ones You’ll Love. Paperclipping Members can find it in the archives.
(Note to Paperclipping Members who have the video of me creating this “page.” To reduce the bulk I moved the corner embellies to the opposite side).
Task-Batch Mini-booking
I call this approach (building all the “foundations” before adding any detailing) Task-Batch Mini-booking. Before it occurred to me to mini-book this way it was very hard for me to complete mini’s because they took so long. But in this way you can make intricate books in no time! Even BIG ones (mine are always big).
If you have a vacation from this summer that deserves a mini-album, you might want to try it!
Shine on,
Noell
P.S.> I have a video tutorial where I demonstrate the Task-Batching process on two different mini-books — one is a dimensional tactile book, while the other is mostly digital and graphic. Paperclipping Members can watch it — it’s #150.
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Tags: hawaii, mini album, minibook, scrapbook, Scrapbooking, vacation