A 'not so mini' Mini Album.....

This is up on the Bella Blog today.....

"Sights and Sounds of the Season"

I have to admit I was super excited when I was asked to create a Christmas mini album as I knew exactly what I wanted to do. I had these (2) great slide out chipboard albums in my stash but they were each only (3) pages and I loved the look of the (6) pages together. Perfect for what I had in mind. Our family LOVES music and listens to it all day long all year long, so when Christmas time rolls around the carols are being played morning until night. We all have our favorites and I wanted to capture this into my album so that as Emma & Alex get older and have their own families they can look back and remember how it was when they were kids.

For me, the cover is always the starting point to my mini albums. It kind of sets the tone for me to get going on the inside. I cut a large snowflake from a piece of Sophisticates using my Silhouette as my first layer. I added a journaling card, a precision cut tree, a chip tree, a flag and stickers too! I wanted lots of dimension, so when I was adding my title I used High Five Alphabet stickers for most of the title but added chip letters for 'season' and then raised stickers on a couple using 3D foam for even a bit more height to match the flag. Oh, and of course I had to have some chunky glitter on the tips of my snowflake too.

For the circle pages I got out my tracing paper to create the covers for both the pages and the pull out and then got to work covering ALL the pages in the album; front, back and inside too. I always use a strong quick dry liquid glue and then sand off the edges to create a finished look to each page.

I gave Scott, Emma and Alex each a piece of white paper to write down what their favorite Christmas song means to them and included these on some of the pull out pages. I added the title of the song, whose favorite it was and the lyrics too.

A few of these pages have journaling from me about the photo and why it's a tradition in our house and of course inside the first page is a little bit about how Christmas began for Scott & I. I thought the kids would get a kick out of reading all about our first holidays together before they were born.

I love everything Bella and had such a blast using so many of the different embellishments throughout each page. I can't wait to have this out as part of our Christmas décor each year, and one day show it to my kids' kids (waaayy down the road of course).

TFL ..... Talk soon.

j. xo