Mini-Book Pages from Gibraltar

I'm sharing the pages from my cruise mini-book in the order that they come in the book, not the the order that I made them. I rarely make holiday album pages in chronological order so that there is no evolution in style or sudden introduction of new supplies as you turn the pages. I've already shared the pages from Málaga but these from Gibraltar were the first that I made.

Gibraltar was our shortest stop, with the fewest photos, so it seemed like a good place to get started and feel my way with this new size. I will have a double page for each port, with as many flaps and inserts as I need to cover everything in that space. This is the initial view for the Gibraltar pages:

The left side, with my title card and a view from the ship at sea, pulls out from a pocket and unfolds to three panels with photos from our cable car trip up the Rock:

Turning that over gives two more panels, and returns to the title page.

The two photos on the right side both lift up to show more photos. The top one has the town hall and a remembrance-themed postbox topper (we visited in November)

and the bottom part has extra photos of the Alameda Botanic Gardens.

Supplies: Cardstock - Art Studio; Papers - Simple Stories Hello Today, Simple Stories Simple Vintage Botanicals; Letters - Glitz Design; Journalling Cards - Project Life; Stickers - Simple Stories, Studio Calico; Washi Tape - Ebay, Little B; Enamel Geotag - Pink Paislee

Mini-Book Pages from Málaga

We flew out to Málaga for our cruise, and then spent the next day in the town. Each port of call is getting one double page in my mini-album and I've decorated four 4x6 title cards (one per port) which will start off the left side along with a photo of the town each time. I'll then add as many flaps and inserts as I need to accommodate my photos and journalling.

This is the initial view of the Málaga pages:

The left side opens out to show photos of the amphitheatre and the Alcazaba (palace) which we had visited before.

The right side is dedicated to the 14th century Castillo de Gibralfaro which was built on a on a hill above the city in order to protect it (spoiler - it failed in 1487). I had plenty of photos that I wanted to include so this page opens out with two flaps:

Supplies: Cardstock - Art Studio; Papers - Simple Stories Hello Today, Pink Paislee Atlas, American Crafts Shimelle; Letters - Teresa Collins; Journalling Cards - Project Life; Stickers - Simple Stories, Studio Calico, Make & Create, 49 and Market, Teresa Collins; Washi Tape - Ebay, Little B; Enamel Geotag - Pink Paislee

Quiz-ical

Time to share a new DT page for Twilight Crafts and Jenny-Wren Cut-Files. I've used Circle in Sections with a photo of our work team after we won the local Chamber of Commerce quiz.

The cut-file was pre-cut in a soft yellow so I looked for a 6x6 pad to match it and found an old one from My Mind's Eye with enough patterns left to make it interesting. I tried to alternate darker and lighter papers but did them randomly rather than in strict rotation as I had varying amounts left.

My embellishment is quite simple as I didn't want to distract from the circular shape of the cut-file by tucking anything in around it. I have a pack of vellum stickers that I would love to finish off, so I placed pairs of black and teal ones in three places and then added trios of enamel dots from the same collection as the papers.

Supplies: Paper - K & Company, My Mind's Eye Now and Then; Letters - American Crafts; Stickers - Studio Calico; Enamel Dots - My Mind's Eye 

Disclosure - I receive digital cut-files free of charge from Twilight Crafts as part of my DT role. All other supplies are my own.

(Page 27 for 2026)

Fly-Cruise Mini-Book Title Page

I'm sharing the first page of my new cruise mini-book today. 

All our previous cruises have started and finished at a UK port, but this was a fly-cruise where we flew out to Málaga and sailed back to Southampton, joining the ship for final week of its 57-night Mediterranean Grand Voyage. 

I will have a double page for each of the ports visited, but this is just a single to get started. The top photo is one I bought onboard which shows our route, and the bottom is one of our ship, Fred. Olsen's Balmoral. Both of these are stuck to flaps that lift up for more photos and journalling.

The top flap lifts to show a photo as we boarded the plane, one of Málaga from the air and a journalling card.

There's more journalling under the bottom flap as our original itinerary was changed due to bad weather so I have an explanation of the changes and then both the old and new versions.

Supplies: Cardstock - Art Studio, Papermania; Paper - Simple Stories Hello Today, Pink Paislee Atlas, Simple Stories Happy Travels, Echo Park Dots and Stripes; Letters - Shimelle; Stickers - Simple Stories, 49 and Market, Tim Holtz; Washi Tape - Little B

(Page 26 for 2026; it's neither 12x12 or 8x8 so doesn't follow my existing 'rules', but I've decided to count this as a whole page in my count for the year. It has the same total surface area as a 12x12 and I also had to make the base page first.)

A New Project for a Fly-Cruise

Up to now, I've made (or planned to make) an album for each of our foreign holidays. However, that is beginning to cause me problems so I am going to change tack.

Both our children have left home and we cut down our working hours in recent years, so we've been able to take more holidays and the albums 'to do' list is growing faster than I can complete them. We've both recently retired completely so this 'problem' is only going to get worse. I am more-or-less completing the current annual albums but I don't find the time to work on the older ones that still have plenty of gaps, or to turn the boxes of pages from even earlier years into albums. This weighs on my mind as I will eventually be leaving all my albums to our daughter (our son has no interest) and I'd rather leave her a complete set of annual albums than a stack for holidays where she wasn't even there.

I don't want to stop documenting our holidays, but I'm going to try switching to making mini-books for them instead of 12x12 albums. I don't plan for the books to be particularly 'mini' as I'm starting with an 8"x8.5" for a fly-cruise we took in November. This one's an experiment to see whether I can make mini-books with enough flips and flaps to hold all the photos and whether I can make them in a shorter time period.

I'll be basing my first mini-book on the 'Jubilee Album' taught by the late Cal Summers in the summer of 2022 to celebrate Queen Elizabeth II's Platinum Jubilee; however I'll obviously be using different papers and I will mix and match the page types to suit my needs rather than making exactly the same book.

My last 12x12 holiday album was for a cruise to Norway in July/August last year. It lasted twelve nights with six ports of call and the resulting album has 36 pages with 148 photos. In November we took a seven night fly-cruise with four ports of call; I expect my mini-book to have two single pages and four double pages (one per port) with extra pockets inside the front and back covers. Cal's version holds 208 photos (which is more than my Norway album does) but, as I said, I'll be modifying her design.

I've bought a stack of A4 kraft cardstock for my basic album structure, but nothing else as I'm planning to 'bash my stash' for this one. I started from the remains of Simple Stories' Hello Today collection; it may be an odd choice as it's an annual collection with patterns on one side of each paper and an assortment of monthly cut-aparts on the other, but I like the way that the colours repeat in different patterns across the collection.

I've added the leftovers of Pink Paislee's Atlas collection which is travel-themed and some of the colours match those in Hello Today. I originally used this for Austria 2016 so it's high time I got the rest used up or passed on. I also have the remains of a 6x6 pad and some journal cards from My Mind's Eye Hello World which I might mix in, though only some of the colours are right.

Since I mostly have scraps of all these collections, I've pulled out some 12x12 papers from Simple Stories, Heidi Swapp, Shimelle, Echo Park and We R Memory Keepers which match the colours of Hello Today. I also have two pieces of memorabilia which I want to include - our cruise log and a postcard with a map of our route.

I'm going to keep the pages flat on this project so that everything folds up neatly. This means no enamel dots or bulky embellishments so I'll be decorating with stickers and punched shapes. I have a sheet of travel-themed washi stickers from 49 and Market, most of a pack of camera-themed clear stickers from Make & Create and a filmstrip washi tape, all in black and white. I won't be using any Thickers and will concentrate on die-cut letters and flat stickers for titles.

All the Grid Squares: Cely Woods & Kenningtons Park

I'm documenting a couple of recent walks in which I resurrected my old project to walk in all the OS grid squares in Thurrock Borough. I'd started this in 2022 but it fell by the wayside in 2023, and now I'm going back to it.

I've blogged previous walks in detail, but my blog is primarily for me and I don't need that detail. I'm more interested in recording which squares I have ticked off, so this post will be a quick summary and a few photos.

My first walk started in Cely Woods and continued through the neighbouring Warwick Wood and White Post Wood. This is all ancient woodland, now managed by Forestry England.

The main track is about 2.5km long but I wandered off deeper into the woods on more minor paths at some points. I was primarily looking for bluebells but made sure that I passed through all four possible grid squares.

My second walk was in Kenningtons Park which is a little way south of Cely Woods. It wasn't clear from the maps online just how much land was accessible and it turned out not to be a huge area, though a notice board in the car park shows their plan to construct new paths in the future.

I explored all the paths, including several dead ends and found myself back at the car park in no time, so went round again to make the walk worth the drive there. 

Small though the area is, I completed two more squares here and also walked a short way into a previously visited square.

I've marked the Cely Woods walk in orange and Kenningtons Park in yellow on the map below; the green squares are ones that I had previously visited; the purple one is my home square; the grey and blue squares are the land and river borders of the borough. The square with a red outline is inside Tilbury Docks and inaccessible.

This leaves me with a small, isolated block of squares in the west of the borough which I will be attempting to visit next. I've outlined them in red here, and marked the borough boundary in black.

A visit to RSPB Rainham Marshes will get me two of them, the left two in the row of three, but I'll need to do some more research to see whether I can use parks or footpaths through the other squares or if I'll have to resort to walking along roads.

80

Today's DT page for Twilight Crafts and Jenny Wren Cut-Files was initially inspired by the February sketch for For the Love of Pretty Paper. I knew that I could use the Star Bunting 1 cut-file with that sketch and a photo from my mum's 80th birthday.

I based my colour scheme on the plate that my mum's holding as I knew I had a mixed media style paper from Vicki Boutin in those colours and, since I store my whole papers by manufacturer/designer, I immediately spotted the floral from another of her collections to go with it. 

I cut half the cut-file from a pink patterned paper to go against the yellow stripes on the background, and ended up cutting it into two pieces so that it would show on the left half of the page.

I built a paper stack behind the photos and went through my embellishment drawers (I store those by colour) for anything else that I could tuck in (and used up a pleasing amount of oddments). 

Supplies: Paper - Vicki Boutin Let's Wander, Vicki Boutin Sweet Rush, Pinkfresh Studio Happy Holidays, Basic Grey Urban Prairie, Paige Evans Bungalow Lane; Numbers - American Crafts; Filmstrip - 49 and Market; Word Stickers - Jen Hadfield; Stars - Hobbycraft; Acetate Heart & Tab Die-Cuts - Unknown

Disclosure - I receive digital cut-files free of charge from Twilight Crafts as part of my DT role. All other supplies are my own.

(Page 25 for the year.)