tutorial : building a mini

Hi all!! I'm here tonight with a tutorial on how I made the mini album in my Continental gallery. I've been holding these Fuji Instax Mini pics from our February trip to Kansas City, just waiting until the right kit came along. As soon as I saw this Making Memories packaging in the Magellan add-on, I knew it would make a perfect cover. The packaging had more of a faux suitcase shape, but I opted to trim it down into a rectangle. I then backed the opening in the front with a transparency and added a couple die cuts and Basic Grey studs to the outside.



Next, I spent some time thinking about how I wanted to construct the inside of the album. Since I was dealing with original photos, I wanted them to be protected - but I needed to keep the pages on a fairly small scale so they'd fit within the cover. Once I came across these divided page protectors (we keep them on hand for the boys' baseball and Pokemon cards), I know I could turn it into individual pages.



I began by cutting the page protector with my trimmer - I left one row of pockets intact, cutting about 1/2in beyond the dividing line. I repeated the cut on the other side of the middle row, which left me with two strips of three pockets. I then cut those strips into three pockets each - one divided page protector will give you six mini album pages.



My next step was to cut three pieces of kraft cardstock to 4x5inches. I scored them 1/2in from the edge and then added one to the back side of my album cover. I then used a hole punch to punch two holes through both the kraft cardstock and the cover.



Using the punched cardstock as my guide, I punched each of my page protectors as well as the two remaining pieces of kraft cardstock.



Since I knew the title page would show through the window in the front of the book, I laid it in place inside the album as I worked on it, and made sure to shut the album to see how it all looked before I stuck everything down! Once I'd finished, I wanted to hide the backs of the staples from my tiny attacher and the stitching, so I layered a second piece of kraft cardstock behind it. If you have additional journaling you'd like to add to your book, both the back of the title page and the back page of the album would be perfect - just stamp some journaling lines and write away!



Now came the fun part - working on the pages! I cut kraft cardstock to the same size as my Instax Mini pics and built from there. Each page got a label stamp stamped with pumice stone ink and punched out with my photo label punch, and a mix of products from the kit.



To bind the album, I simply stacked up all of my pages and threaded a length of twine through the two holes. I looped it around three times and then tied it off at the back of the album.



My boys have enjoyed flipping through this album - the size is perfect for little hands!!