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.
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