Random Memories Mini

I took the  Pop of the Page class to learn how to layer elements, but I meant to use the skills mostly for decorating presents, boxes, cards and the such, because I prefer my scrapbook layouts to be flat-ish.

But inspired by Jen Jockish and the amazing contributors to the class, I thought maybe I could risk a mini book? My first thought was to use some black & white pictures, but when I went looking for them I found a box with lots of memorabilia and decided to make a mini album of random memories instead.

I had a very small album with a big wire binding - ideal for bulky pages, so I started working. Everything but the kitchen sink was my motto!

Cover:

Opening page:

One of the things Jen said was to have some repeating elements in the mini, to give a sense of unity, so I decide to use the right page to house memorabilia/photos/decorations and on the left have the same shape journaling card.

The first page has our temporary membership cards for a sports club in my hometown. The pocket holds our cards and I used a spare photo of my daughter to decorate the front. I sanded the points of the leaf shaped pins to make them blunt. I am scared of pins!

My son's first proper shoes. The lady at the shop (Clark's) took a polaroid photo of him with the shoes, and gave a note with his shoe size and date.

Disneyland Paris. I took lots of photos which never made into an album... Here are the entrance tickets, plus one for the Paris metro. I secured the tickets with washi tape and you can see all of them separately.

Spare of passport photos...

I think this was the only time the four of us squeezed instead a photobooth. Must do it again!

Tickets for a Thomas the Tank Engine show. The Thomas image is the label for a shoe. Hoarder, me?

When my daughter had her first haircut, the hairdresser put a little bit of the hair in cellophane paper. I forgot I had it. This page is still missing something, I'll probably add a die cut later.

There's still lots of empty pages, but the album is already quite bulky so I am deciding if I will add more to it or not.

TFL!

Summer Album

What makes me very happy about this album is that I worked while it was happening and finished at the beginning of September.

I wish I was always organised like that, it is much more fun when the events are fresh in my mind.

At the beginning of the summer I asked the children to list a few things they wanted to do. While probably they would'nt be able to do everything, at least we could try to do a few of the things they wanted - I also said to keep it realistic. Still, they wanted a pet and my daughter wanted to spend €50 in Claire's.  I said no to the first one and told my daughter that unless she had a plan on how to earn that amount of money, it wasn't going to happen! :-)

 The mini album recorded a few of the things we wanted to do, plus a few unplanned things. I wanted to make my children aware of how lucky they are, and also how many things we did in the two months of summer holidays.

I started off with a landscape format sketch pad, which I first trimmed, then disassembled. I used the Silhouette to cut the cover, and some extra pages in patterned paper.

Here are some of the pages.

Cover:

I was initially concerned I wouldn't have enough things to fill the pages - I had planned a double page per event. As it turned out, I had to down because the album was getting too bulky.

 Ice cream is a must:

So are summer camps:

1st of August was our 10 year anniversary of my daughter's adoption day:

We visited tayto park:

 Holiday in Westport (Co Mayo) and Cascais (Portugal). Here's Portugal's page:

By then, the pages were getting too bulk, so I put 4 events in a double page. Notice the bottom  left photos. I put the kids to clean the house. They did complain, but not too much ;-)

And the last page. Getting ready to go back to school. My son wanted Moshi Monsters name tags for his books. And there we still things I wanted to record which I stuck to the inside of the back cover page.

And we also went to the cinema.

I brought my son to see The Lorax while my husband watched Spiderman with my daughter. Later I brought both of the for the Dog Day Diary of a Wimpy Kit. The bottom film was supposed to be The Amazing Spiderman, but by mistake i put The Dark Knight Rise, which was a film I went with my husband to watch...

One page of my Summer mini album

At the beginning of the summer holidays, I asked my children to list the things they wanted to do. I told them that not everything would be accomplished (get a cat? no! spend €50 in Claire's? no!) but at least it would be something to aim for.

Last year we made the list, but I never made the mini album I meant to, this year I decided that I would work in the album and have it ready by the end of the school holidays.

School starts tomorrow, and I only have a couple of pages to finish, so i am quite proud of it. Hopefully I'll have it ready by tomorrow so we can look it together and see how much fun we had in the last two months.

I'll share the cover and some pages later this week - today I only have one page, our trip to Cascais, Portugal. The left page was inspired by a layout by supertoni, for a scraplift challenge in Studio Calico's forum.

Here's supertoni's original layout:

Thanks for the inspiration, Toni!

A quick mini book

Last month I posted a flag book. The spine of the flag book is a concertina to which you attach paper strips and it got me thinking that I could make a mini book that way. I was almost sure that I had seen something like that before but couldn't find the source.

After I finished mine, I saw a beautiful one by Michelle La Grue, but you have to take my word for it, I took  a quick look and can't see it in her blog.

Summer last year I took the kids to the city centre to buy a tweed cap for my Dad (more of it later). Since we had the whole day, I decided to bring them to visit the National Gallery, the National History Museum, with a stop for lunch in the Kilkenny Design Centre and some fun in the ]Merrion Square playground.

Of course I took my camera  and I planned a mini album based on the trip. It was all the be designed digitally and printed in 6x4 photo paper. One thing about me though, it that I loose steam pretty quickly. If I don't finish something say a week or so, I get bored and start to do something else. Which is what happened.

Last month, I was sorting out my stuff when I came across the printed pages. Then I remembered the idea to make a concertina-based (must find out the proper name for it) mini book and it all came together quickly.

The cover is acetate - I stuck the title there. The spine is held together with Studio Calico fabrips and coloured bias tape (by Lily). The page that you can see through was done digitally; the photo, the border, the background and the sellotape are all digital elements put together in PSE.

And there some of the pages:

I can't resist a colourful wall. And colourful umbrellas.

 Mosaic floor in the National Gallery

 My son modelling the cap.

The journaling is too small to read and way too long also so I'll give you the short version:

My Dad asked me to buy him a tweed cap for him. I told him it was made of wool and unsuitable for where he lives (Brazil). He insisted it was made of cotton because he read it somewhere that it was cotton. No, he wouldn't trust his daughter who lives in Ireland nor his son-in-law who is Irish. So eventually I bought him a tweed cap knowing very well that it would never be used.

*Patterned Paper: scraps from Basic Grey, 7gypsies and October Afternoon among others.
*Digital elements: You are here by Paislee Press and Queen of Quirk,  among others.
*Other: Studio Calico Fabrips, bias tape

Phuket - part 2

I wanted this mini book to have as many photos as possible, as well as hold the postcards, airplane tickets, coins and brochures we got in Thailand. It is 90% finished. Ironically, one item missing is the first thing I did towards making this mini book. On the last day of our trip, sitting in a restaurant, I asked my husband and children what were the highlights of the trip in their opinions. We all wrote our answers in a napkin and I stashed it in my knapsack; can't find if now!

The cover is a postcard; it had to go sideways because I didn't want to trim it. I wish I could draw like that! The girl is from a brochure for a butterfly garden we visited.

Opening page, with a pocket with some arline tickets.

The hotel, map of the island.

The pool. Gorgeous!

One of my son's favourite memories; riding on an elephant.

The colours. The flowers.

My top 3 highlights.

The back is another postcard.

* Patterned Paper: My Mind's Eye and paper scraps
* Album: Linda Kelly
* Letter stickers: Basic Grey
* Digital notepaper: Paislee Press

A Personalised Book

 This is an old project which I think I never shared.

When my daughter was in Junior Infants, her teacher gave to all the children in her class personalised books for Christmas. In each story, the main character had the child's name and somewhere in the story there were bits about them like their ages, best friends, etc.

The booklet was made of A4 pages folder in 4 and stapled together and had the name of a website on it, northpole.com. My daughter loved the book, and a year later, at Christmas time, we found the book and reread it. I got curious and went to the website. It has lots of Christmas related stuff, including personalised stories. To my delight, there were two more stories, and I decided to print one story for my daughter and another for my son.

There were two options on how to print the story too, one for a quick fold&staple A6 book and another option to print the story in A5 size in both sides of the paper. Which gave me the idea to try to make a properly bound book. I found a great tutorial and quickly made the two books. The one I am displaying is my daughter's - it is a bit worn out (being 3 years in a child's bookshelf), but not damaged otherwise.

Sadly the tutorial has been removed, there are other ones for single section bookbinding, but not as detailed  as the one I followed. Here's one.

For the cover I used corrugated cardboard covered in patterned paper. It is a Basic Grey pattern, given free with a scrapbook magazine and printed on a thinner, shinier paper then the usual one. That's the part that got worn out. The tutorial said to use fabric for the spine, but since I hadn't any in hand I used handmade paper instead. Handmade paper is both more maleable and stronger than ordinary paper so I figured out it would do. And it did, the spine is still in good condition.

The title page and the first chaper.

Have a go, it would made a great (and unexpensive) present for any child aged 6 or under.

Halloween - from 2008 to 2010

I am convinced that I have only 10% of the stash of an average scrapbooker/paper crafter. All my papers fit in a since shelf. Another shelf for my bigger embellishments, and a few shelves for bits and pieces - so what's on the rest of my lovely shiny white IKEA storage cabinets?

Magazines (tons of them!). Plus "things-that-could-be-useful-sometime-so-I-wont-get-rid-of-them".  So I hit on this brilliant idea: why not actually use these things instead of only storing them? I'm a genius, don't you think?

Like this 7 gypsies mini book that is probably 5 years old. Since I had previously made a mini with the Halloween photos up to 2007, this one starts where the other one stopped.

Very simple, most of the digital elements are from Karla Dudley's kit which I won in her blog.

 cover

For every year, I wrote a short journaling about the kids' costumes
the opposite side was looking bare so I added 4 tiny photos from the same year

Two photos of each  child per year, sometimes with word art or doodles

there's even a photo of the 4 of us, taken by a neighbour while we were trick or treating

TFL!

*Digital elements: Swank Labels by Jennifer Pebbles @ Two Peas in a Bucket (frame), Paper Crave (bat image, not seen), Spook by Karla Dudley @ Design House Digital
*Mini Album: 7 Gypsies