Disney Album

Hi everybody! I'm super duper excited to share with you all my very first project for the Crate Paper 2016 design team! Yay! So for my first project I wanted to use the Little You collection to create a super sweet and whimsical mini album about my recent trips to Disneyland. I love Disneyland! It's so magical and cutesy and filled with childlike wonder and I feel like the Little You collection really works for a project about the "happiest place on earth" because it has that same fanciful and innocent feeling! I know that most of you might look at the Little You collection and think it's just for babies...but with all of it's beautiful and sweet imagery and some really elegantly simple and versatile pattern papers, it's so easy to use for multiple subject matters and themes! Obviously, there are some cute baby specific embellishments and things in the collection, but there is also quite a bit that can be applied to everyday projects or spring projects or projects about you and your loved one. In my case, I saw the collection, its charm and it's color scheme and immediately thought "Disney"! My husband and I recently got passes so we have been going to Disneyland more and more often(as often as we can with my health condition). Anyway, for me Disney is a place where Dreams come true and true love lives and fairytale endings abound! This is what I decided to focus on with the album.

First, I attacked the cover. To me it's always the most difficult part of and album, but I like to do it first whenever possible because I really feel that it sets the tone for the entire mini. Paper is almost always my favorite part of any collection, so I grabbed some of the papers out of the 6x6 paper pads and started playing. I wanted to layer them for a kind of background for my cover. I decided the cover should have a real personal and unique touch to it, since Disneyland is so special to me, so I drew my own version of the Sleeping Beauty castle at Disneyland. Like I said, the colors in the Little You collection really scream to me Disney especially because they are the colors of the castle, so it really seemed to fit. Once I drew the castle, I painted it with watercolors and then I created a little sequin shaker card using the gold glitter frame found in the chipboard stickers set.

I also printed the words "disney days" onto vellum and attached it with the sewing machine to make

a title for my album. I added a few other little touches to the cover, like one of the oh so cute decorative enamel paper clip embellishments (the one withe the star), a wooden button from the mixed buttons embelies, and

a few label and word phrase stickers, and and voila!

When you first open the album, you are greeted by a Mickey Mouse tag that I made using the pattern papers from the Little You collection, and behind him is an intro that I typed up on a piece of vellum and then attached to the stars pattern paper from the boy side of Little You with another one of the super cute decorative paperclips. You'll find a few of these throughout the album. I also made a 2x2 pocket page intro with pics from several different Disney visits and mixed them in between pockets showcasing cute Little You patterns and embellishments like the smiling pink star from the girls ephemera pack. I also cut out a piece of the gold foiled vellum sheet that comes in the collection, to place the words "love you" in the bottom corner to signify my love for Disney. For the gold foil castle, I used the Minc machine and then added a little enamel fox button from the boys mixed decorative buttons and attached a tiny pattern paper flag to a paperclip.

For the inside of the album, I decided to keep things fairly simple. So I started by cutting down the

12x12 pattern papers to 6x8 pages. I had four different trips to Disneyland that I wanted to document

so I broke the album into sections and did a pocket page and a layout for each section. For the pocket pages, I mixed in vintage Disney ephemera that I had, and some pocket page cards that I designed on photoshop (like the "i'll be your minnie, if you'll be my minnie" card) with cutout pieces from the cut apart sheets in the collection along with cute embelishments from the Little You collection, like the thickers, buttons, enamel dots, decorative paper clips, stickers, etc. I basically did the same thing for the layouts, sometimes adding in some sewing and drawings too (like on my "love you to the moon and back" layout, where I attached the gold foil vellum from the collection via the sewing machine, and also added a little drawing of Mickey).

I really enjoyed working with the Little You collection for my Disney Days album! It was so much fun!

I know it can sometimes seem difficult to use a collection for something other than the obvious theme, but it's really fun and easy actually and I think you will find that you can use Little You for your little child or for the childlike wonder and imagination that lies within your heart and within all of us! I hope you like my mini album and that I've inspired you to create your next project using Crate Paper's Little You collection!