A not-so-mini Paris mini!

Hello! September and the first half of October have passed in a bit of a blur, with birthday celebrations and weekends away filling the time I usually spend here. But it does mean I have a few things to show you though, now we're well into Autumn.

When I was last here, I talked about this time of year being an auspicious time to start new projects, and a couple of weeks ago, I started this one. I would call it a mini-book, but think it's a bit big for that at 8x8"!

Earlier this year, I went on a weekend break to Paris, and took loads of photos. I got them printed online and bought a photo album for them, and then realised the photos were 5x7" and the album was for 4x6" - oops! The photos then went into a box and stayed there, and the album became a good excuse to print some of the many photos I take each month. But the Paris photos still didn't have a home and a scrapbook seemed like too large an undertaking for all of the stories I wanted to tell. That box made me feel guilty every time I looked at it.

A couple of weeks ago, I started sorting through some of my scrapbooking boxes to restore a bit of order to them, and I found a Shimelle class kit from a couple of years ago at Version Scrap in Paris. This seemed very serendipitous when I looked up at my box of photos. The class was called 'Wrapped in Wood', and it contained 2 chipboard covers, cardstock in blues and purples and some sheets of patterned paper. I remembered breaking the kit up at some point to give some to my mum, so I shopped in my own stash for some other papers to match, and found the class pdf to remember what it looked like.

So I chopped up all my papers to 20cm x 20cm, and then followed the cover instructions more or less exactly because I loved it - thank you, Shimelle! I spent a happy couple of hours one evening sorting through my photos and then didn't really look at the pdf again for the duration of the process, but the result is very much inspired by it.

The kit included two little dividers, which I turned into markers to show what day we were on. I like the mixture of sizes, it makes it a very tactile book. I had to think of it as a photo book rather than a scrapbook to make it a less formidable task to begin, but it has ended up being much more scrapbook-like than I set out to do. The more pages I finished, the more I enjoyed making them. By some miracle, I had more or less just the right amount of photos for my pages (front and back), which was possibly more by good luck than good judgement!

It took about a week and half of evenings to finish all the pages, and last weekend, I sat down to bind it. I have a bind-it-all, so that is how I put it together. I was terrified of ruining it at this point, but apart from marking the cover slightly and having to move a flower embellishment midway through punching the holes, all was well.

It was a very frugal project really - all of the paper embellishments and mounts came from scraps from cutting the base pages to 20x20 cm, so I had very little left at the end. I'm really pleased with how it came out, I finally got to use some papers from my stash that I love and hadn't found a use for, and it's a really nice record of our trip. Win, win. 

In other news...

New shoes of joy!! :o)