28
Jun
Mini-Books
Last year, for my wife’s birthday, I created a little mini-book for her. Now, you should understand, I don’t call myself a scrapbooker. That’s her realm. I take her to the store, let her go to the LSS for Scrappin Evenings, I support her as well as I can… but I don’t generally paste pictures to paper. But last year I wanted to do something a little special. I made a ten page book, where each “page” is actually two pages face-to-face. That gave me a pallete of about 6×8 to work within.
I gotta tell you, if you’re going to make a mini-book, buy all your paper at once, so it’ll all match. And it’ll even be from the same dye lot, just like yarn. But if you’re as, ahem, tonally-challanged as I am, just go to the Basic Grey display and pull a bunch of pages from one column. Get some normal colors (plain) as well as some patterns; too many patterns will just confuse the pictures.
Most of the pages I set up, I used the book open horizontally, so it was “landscape”. But a few of my layouts happened to work better vertically. Because I was using two “pages” to make one “page”, I had to deal with the crease in the middle- where the pages meet. Some of them were easy. Some of them were difficult (I did one page with a long panoramic across both pages- just cut the image where it needed to be split in order to put part on each sheet).
Because the pages were so small, and because I really liked the pictures being large enough to see, I had to be creative about the journalling. Some of the journalling is on little tags that are tied into the binding, and some is on little tabs that slipped into some neat little vellum envelopes. But for the most part, I tried to make the pages be primarily photos, to capture the spirits that I see in my wife.
