How-to | Make a Mini-Album

When sharing a mini-album on my blog, I often get comments and questions by people asking me how I go about making a project like this, telling me they don’t know how to tackle a mini-album. I notice people often get intimidated by mini-albums. So I thought I’d share a bit of my process with you here today.

Step 1 | Collect your photos. I usually start the idea of a mini-album with a bunch of pictures. Wether they’re about a particular event, a person, a feeling, an atmosphere, etc., I collect a few pictures of which I feel that they belong together for some kind of reason. For instance, I have made albums about birthdays, my daughter, summer, and more in the past. For my latest bloghop album, I had about 15 pictures of my daughters’ second birthday.

Step 2 | Select your patterned papers. When selecting my papers, I usually go by color first. I try to imagine what colors would work well for my set of pictures. It often helps me to take my pictures and lay them out on top of my patterned papers, some combos will feel good, some combos won’t. After color selections, I think about patterns. For this particular album about my daughters’ birthday, I worked with the 6×6 paper pad, that I found in my February Card Kit from Studio Calico, a perfect match for my sweet set of pictures.

Step 3 |  Matching embellishments. At this point I start to think more outside the essentials. I search through my stash of products for elements that would work well with the basics that I have selected at this point. Embellishments of all kinds, stamps, … For the birthday mini-album I even selected a few journaling cards.

Don’t go too crazy at this point, because too many options just make you feel overwhelmed. If necessary you can always add more items along the way. Having a selection of embellishments before starting, helps to tie your album together in the end. Having elements that get repeated throughout the album, makes it feel as if it all belongs together, makes it feel like this is one big project instead of a selection of small ones.

Step 4 | Type of album. Before actually starting to put your mini-album together, you have to decide on what type of album you choose for. This step is often woven in between the previous steps for me. Along the way, I start to make up my mind on where I want to go with this project, it takes form in my head.

If you have a big amount of pictures, it might be an idea to consider pocket scrapping. Divided page protectors allow you to easily play with different pictures on one page. If you have a more manageable amount of pictures, you can go for a more classic type of mini-album (with rings or another binding technique). For my bloghop mini I had about 15 pictures.  Since I was planning on working with binder rings and so had a bit more freedom in the thickness of this album, I could work with one picture per page.

Step 5 | Go for it. At this point the fun begins. I usually match each of my pictures with one of the patterned papers, and then decide on the order of the pages. My birthday album has a chronological order, and one picture per page. I also made a few filler pages – not that my album really needed more filling;) – which have no picture, but are only embellished and leave room for journaling.

And then comes the fun part, making the pages. Just have fun!! There are no rules, just create. When you feel like this step is a little bit daunting, it helps when you approach each page as a small layout.

Hope this will help you take the leap to make a mini-album yourself or at least to feel a bit less overwhelmed when doing so. Don’t hesitate to leave questions you might have in the comment section. Have fun creating!!

Els.

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