Vacation Mini-Album

Whether you plan to take to the road, tent in your trunk, or fly high to the City of Lights, chances are you'll have your camera with you when you go on vacation. Chances are you'll want to show off the highlights of your trip right away, too. If you've ever undertaken the task of scrapping a vacation, you know it might be another year before it's finished. Make yourself a vacation mini-album right away, and you can show off your adventure in style.

Types of mini-albums

There are a number of options you can consider when choosing how to display your photos and memorabilia. Some will allow you to pull together a classy project quickly; others may be miniature works of art in themselves. You decide.

Quick and easy options

• Small, premade mini-album, such as those made by Making Memories or Bazzill
• Pre-made tags bound together with ribbon or a binder ring
• Any of the wonderful kit options, with coordinating papers and embellishments

More involved options

• Handmade accordion book
• Matchbook album
• Altered items bound as a mini-book. Check out Donna Downey's Creative Albums book for all kinds of ways to make a special album.

Album themes

Creating a mini-album is different than a complete vacation scrapbook. A vacation scrapbook would cover the entire vacation in detail, while the mini-album is more limited in scope. You will want to make the mini-album quickly after returning home so when people ask how your vacation went you will have something to show.

It's helpful to determine a theme to limit your project to a manageable size. Choosing a limited theme will help you make decisions regarding your scrapping supplies, as well as helping to limit the photos and memorabilia. Here are a few ideas to consider.

• Favorites. Maybe these are favorite photos, favorite places, favorite moments.
  
  
• A single event. Did you go up the stairs inside the Statue of Liberty and take in the view?
  
  
• A category of photos. When I travel overseas, I'm always taken by the little differences that tell me, "I'm not in the USA anymore." The Sunday market in Annecy, France was a highlight of last summer's vacation for me. I know others who like to photograph doors and windows. Street performers are another fun subject for a mini-album.
  
  
  

What to include

On a vacation, you're likely to gather all kinds of little bits and pieces. Restaurant napkins, subway tickets, postcards, business cards, foreign coins, and such can add an element of fun to your project.

When choosing your photos for this project, pick your strongest photos and limit them to just one or two per page, depending on the size of your album. You can tuck your memorabilia in as part of the design as well.

How much journaling you want to include in this project is up to you, as always. For a "show and tell" album like this, you may simply include the who, what and where. Perhaps you want to tell a story connected with the featured photo. Often, our vacations provide us with a few surprises or special stories, and these can be fun to retell in the pages of your album.

Because you're working in a smaller scale, a simpler design will not only help you complete your album quickly, it will help focus attention on your theme, shared through photos, words and memorabilia. Too many embellishments and fancy layout elements can clutter such small space. If you've wanted to try to emulate the clean and simple look, this kind of album is the perfect place to try.

You may want to adopt a "formula" layout to facilitate quick scrapping. I once did an album of an afternoon spent with my mom, visiting all the "Linus Blankets St. Paul" statues. I used cardstock in only two colors, placing a photo on the page with a wide strip of contrasting cardstock either vertically or horizontally placed. Embellishments consisted of punched circles of two sizes, arranged on the long edge of the cardstock strip. The album has consistency throughout, allowing the fun photos to take center stage, and me to actually complete an album!

Whatever you choose to do, enjoy the process, relive the vacation, then enjoy sharing it with everyone you meet in your special "brag book."