i promised to show you my disneyland album re-do, and i'm here to do just that. just to be clear, it's NOT the mini album i just shared. i might not have made that clear, since a few of you thought i was re-doing that album. that one stays, it's one of my favorites. the one i'm re-doing is from a trip we took back in 2002. that was seven full years ago. and back then, i was using creative memories albums. and apparently, i had come up with a very simple plan for this trip's photos.
this was basically what all my pages looked like. a cardstock background (regular stuff, this was before textured cardtock). 2-3 photos mounted on white cardstock. and journaling, in a huge font. that was it. this album had at least 40 pages to it, maybe 45. i had a page for every disney character we met. a page for each ride (not EVERY ride in the park, but quite a few). and most of them were done, but a few pages still needed the photos added on. i had sticky notes on each page, since these pages had to be done directly on the album page. didn't want to get mixed up.
i've known that this album wasn't done. it's gotten moved around the shelves quite a bit. but for some reason, it caught my eye last week. i was looking through it, realizing that i would never be able to actually finish it now. not in the style i had started it. i gave it about 2 minutes of thought, and started tearing pages apart. yep, no looking back. just went for it. i tore off all the journaling blocks and put them aside, figuring i would re-type it and add it to my new plan.
the photos came off pretty easily. i have a lot of practice tearing photos off old pages. lol! about halfway through this process, i realized i had another envelope of photos put away from this trip. so i dug it out. and it actually had most of these photos in there. back then, i'd take my rolls of film in and get the duplicates. so a lot of the photos i was tearing off, i was able to just use the duplicates for and start fresh. i got organized and sorted the photos and thought up my game plan.
i was going to switch to an 8×8 album. crop down the photos, add them to cardstock, and hand journal. but that would be a lot of pages still. then i thought about mixing some of the characters together. like putting a few princesses on the same page. or putting mickey mouse and minnie mouse together. but that would still be a lot of pages. and then there wasn't quite enough room for anything else. then i got the idea to just stay with the 12×12 size, but really condense it down to just a few pages. so i started cropping photos and collaging the heck out of these photos. i got down to just 52 photos and 7 pages.
basically, my intro page for the trip. i'm not actually loving this page. i wanted to use red, but the pink matched what we were wearing better. lol! so my basic plan was to use all white cardstock, lots of photos, and simple embellishments. for the titles, i used chipboard or foam letters. used basics, like ribbons and buttons for quick embellishing. and i used a black pen to freehand draw lines around the edges of the pages. that's about it.
i love trimming photos down into collages. if these photos had been from my digial days, then i probably would have just cropped them smaller in photoshop. but i was working with regular, 4×6 photos. so it's just a matter of trimming them, and then trimming them some more, until they all fit together. when you have 16 photos out, it's sort of hard to know where to start. hard to imagine you can fit them all on just 2 pages. but i start cropping them little bits at a time. once they start fitting together and i know where they're going to go, it just sort of works out.
you see that photo of joe and sarah dancing on this page? i had that photo, and another matching one, taking up an entire page before. even though i cropped it quite a bit, it has all the important stuff still in the photo.
when i start cropping, i usually go in small amounts. then i go a quarter of an inch at a time. a little here, a little there. that way, i don't go too far and have something not fit. but occasionally, it DOES happen. like on that bottom photo of sarah at the fountain. once i got the photos pieced together like i wanted, i realized that photo needed to be a bit wider. so i just dug out the trimmed off piece of the photo from my garbage, and adhered it back together. if you look closely, you can tell. but i don't think most people would notice.
this is what i'm talking about people. 19 characters on 2 pages! before, this was 19 seperate pages in an album. i had a photo of the girls with the character, and then a photo of the character signing the girls autograph books. i do like that i have the journaling about each character and how we came to find them in the park. so i do plan on typing that back up. i'm thinking of printing my journaling onto 6×12 pieces of cardstock and adding them to the album with the 6×12 page protectors in between the pages.
having a page for each character was sort of cute. but putting them all together like this is kind of cool too.
we also had the autograph books for each of the girls. i had always planned on tearing out the pages and putting them into the album somehow. i realized the divided page protectors would be perfect for these. all the autographs fit into 2 page protectors (which is 4 pages front and back).
i think some of their autographs are super cool. i wish i could sign my name all fancy like that. lol!
photos from the rides. before, i think this was 5 seperate pages. now, it's just one page. and that third photo down on the right side just makes me laugh. you can see the girls fighting over who is working the controls. and you can see joe giving that look like "get me off of here". lol!
and of course, minnie mouse's house deserved a page of it's own. we waited forever to get in that house. and it was the girls favorite part of the park. that photo of them in her kitchen sink has always been one of my favorites.
so there you have it. 7 pages of photos, and 4 pages of autographs. that's all i needed to document this trip. like i said, i'll be adding some journaling from what i tore out of the old album. probably just using 6×12 journaling pages mixed it, or even 8.5×11 pages. we'll see. i really love how this turned out. so simple really. and i can add these directly into our vacation albums, right in the year 2002. no seperate album to dig out. just mixed in with all our other trips.
Laura Vegas 
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