A Mini Album for the Road

Mini Albums have always held a special place in our heart. They're tiny, portable and make a great companion when out and about traveling to different destinations. CP Gal, Maria Lacuesta, crafted a mini about a recent trip to Portland. She loved it so much, she made duplicates for her travel companions.

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I love making mini albums and I'm so excited to share my newest one documenting a recent getaway to Portland, ME. For my cover, I tinted a photo of Maine's beautiful rocky shore, printed it 8" x 6" on matte photo paper, and folded it in half. I also used Thickers from the 'Journey collection' to create a bold title on the front of the booklet.

I thought it would be nice to make duplicate mini albums for each of my travel companions as well, so I kept things simple. My plan is to slip the albums into small envelopes and drop them in the post, so I wanted to keep all my pages relatively flat.

This was easy to do using a basic pamphlet construction for the base of my album. I simply secured the pages with staples in the center fold using a long arm stapler. This is the fastest method I've used to create mini albums.

For the inside of my album, I limited my materials to patterned papers from the 'Confetti' collection by Maggie Holmes, puffy stickers from the 'Journey' collection, vellum, and typed journaling on plain white paper.

Because the rest of my mini book was so simple, I wanted to create a layered effect, so I cut pages of varying sizes. It was such an easy way to add interest to my album and incorporate a bit more patterned paper.

In the center of my album is a big two page photo. I love the impact of this oversized image and I decided to keep these pages free of any embellishments or journaling.

In these pages, you can see all of the different layers I incorporated into my album. I had to be mindful of the sheer vellum and various elements in order to keep my composition cohesive.

And no project is complete without a few happy little accidents. On the left, my vertical photo is too big and hangs off of the small horizontal page it's attached to, but I think the layered effect here works. On the right, you can see the backside of a photo through the sheer vellum, but I think the white space adds balance to the page.

And on the last page, the photo I printed is clearly too big to fit onto one page, so I had to cut it into two pieces. But again, I really like this "imperfection" and wouldn't want to change it.