My First Mini Album

I wanted to share with you today a special project that I put together in two short days, not even full days, just half ones. My first ever mini album!

Manny and I celebrated our first wedding anniversary the other week and when it came to giving him a gift, I wanted it to be something from the heart and treasured.

The traditional gift on your first wedding anniversary is paper, so I thought I would put together a quick little album celebrating the first seven years of our lives together. The idea came to me just a couple of days before our anniversary, so I wasn't sure if I would be able to pull it off. Amazingly, I did!

So I took this from my stash (which has been in there for forever):

There are a total of 16 pages if you count the front and back. As I had quite a few photos to include, I decided to use it all. Which in the end, resulted in the album not fitting back in the tin and I am ok with that. I just tied a ribbon around it to hold it all together.

Printed some of my favorite photos (after turning them black and white) that represented our first seven years together on my Instax printer (used all but 2):

Then pulled a bunch of supplies from my stash:

Which included:

• Two 6x6 paper pads that would coordinate well together color wise (Basic Grey "J'Adore" and Shimelle's from her first collection)
• A few sets of alpha stickers (October Afternoon, Elle's Studio, Ali Edwards, Kelly Purkey, Tim Holtz)
• Coordinating sticker sheets and chipboard embellishments from Basic Grey "J'Adore" collection
• Martha Stewart mini doilies, washi tape (black with white dots), enamel dots from Doodlebug, Shimelle's Roller Date Stamp
• Phrase roller stamps from October Afternoon and Amy Tangerine
• Dies from Spellbinders, Die-namics and Momenta

Since I didn't give myself much time to complete this, I wanted to limit the supplies I had to use and to repeat at least one element throughout the mini album to bring cohesion to it. I chose the washi tape and the date stamp to be my repeated elements.

When I sat down to put the album together, I was quite nervous. I wasn't sure if I could finish, wasn't sure if it would look nice, wasn't sure of the size, just wasn't sure about a lot of things.

However, when all was said and done, I was in love with it. I couldn't stop flipping through the pages and just being amazed I did it!

Here is what it looked like:

The icing on the cake was when I gave it to him, he smiled and made little comments about the memories for each of the photos.

After completing my first mini album, I've decided that I must make more! It was so much fun to create once I got over my nervousness.

The best tip I have about making a mini album is this...Keep It Simple!

By minimizing my supplies, printing all my photos in black and white and repeating one or two elements across each page, really helped in putting this album together quickly!