My Austrian Albums

We've visited Austria twice, in the summers of 2014 and 2016, and both holidays now have albums. I finished the pages from 2016 last summer, but they've languished in a pizza box ever since. 2014 took much longer to scrap and I finished the final couple of pages last week. I decided to buy two identical albums, found some by First Editions that I liked, and happily they were in an unadvertised multi-buy deal which saved me a few pounds.

The new albums are snap-load albums, which I love. They look like post-bound albums, but the pages are much easier to add to the album and there's no fiddling about trying to attach screws and posts while keeping all the pages from escaping. On the down side, the covers seem to be paper so I hope they'll stand up to some handling without getting scuffed or torn. 

My final task for each album was to make a title piece for the window in the front cover. I did 2016 first as I had originally used one paper collection (Atlas from Pink Paislee) for that album so just chose those scraps to make the title block.

I went with similar placements of the elements on the 2014 title, using papers and embellishments that were mostly leftovers from the divided pages that I made last for this album.

Finally, as I put all the pages in the albums, I checked them over looking for loose pieces or for any pages that needed something extra. All of 2016 was fine, and I think that was because I'd created them over a relatively short period of time (10 months) with a consistent kit of papers and embellishments.

By contrast, I took three and a half years to make the pages from 2014, and used a variety of papers along the way, picking whatever took my fancy at the time. Trends and products have changed over that period and so have my tastes and scrapbooking style. As I've put these pages in the album, I have also added a few pieces (mostly enamel dots, wood veneers and puffy stickers) to try to make the older pages fit in with the newer pages a bit better.