Laura Vegas

I don't seem to have many projects to share lately, which means I haven't been blogging as much. It all seems to go hand-in-hand. It's like I need a finished project in order to blog. There is one project that I've been working on for a while though, and that's a mini album that I'm putting together containing all of Alyssa's band photos from her four years of high school. I thought I would do a few posts, spread out over the next week or two (or three, depending on how life goes), on the process of creating this project and getting it all assembled.

The first thing I thought I would share is the supplies. I choose to use a 6×8" Sn@p binder album from Simple Stories for this project. I love these albums. They're sturdier than a few other 6×8" albums that I've seen, I love the dividers that come inside, and they have a great mix of divided page protectors available to add in. I choose the green album, since our school color is green. A darker green, but this still works.

Now for the divided page protectors. I used all Simple Stories page protectors. I made sure to have at least one package of each configuration on hand when I started this project back in May. I quickly learned which were my favorites and which ones I didn't seem to use that often. I had to stock up on some of the designs that I was using the most of.

I used one of these two configurations for the start and end of each "section" in the album. More on the photos later, but I had basically seperated the years, and then seperated all of the events within each school year as well. So each time I was switching to a new event, or a new concert, I used one of these page protectors to start that section. I liked that I could highlight a favorite photo as a 4×6" photo, and then use one of the 2×3" pockets or a 4×6" pocket to add in the name and date of the event.  

These two configurations were also favorites to use. About 98% of the photos for this album all came from Alyssa's iPod, older cell phone, or her iPhone. And a huge majority of those photos worked well as squares. I thought I would use the full sheet of 2×2" pockets more than I actually did use it. I mainly ended up using that configuration for the photos from the football games and marching band, since I had SO many photos to fit in.

These were also configurations that I used quite a bit. I loved that the first one has all square spots as well, and I actually ended up cutting that page protector down a few times, and just using the two 4×4" pockets. Kind of fun to have a different sized page protector mixed in here and there. I ended up printing just a few photos as 6×8" prints, but I also used this second page protector to hold a sheet of paper with horizontal photos adhered down.

These three configurations hardly got used. I thought for sure I would use the third one more, with the four 3×4" pockets, but turns out that all of the photos that I wanted to print as 3×4" prints were horizontal, and not vertical.

And that, my friends, was the biggest issue I ran into with these divided page protectors. Not having very many options for incorporating horizontal photos, other than the 4×6" size, was very limiting. A huge majority of Alyssa's photos were all horizontal, and while a lot of them could be easily cropped into squares, a lot of them could not. I hardly came across any vertical photos, otherwise, it would have made things a lot easier. My main option on the horizontal photos was to print them as 2×3's, and put them into the square pockets, leaving room to fill with patterned paper or something. Which is fine, and easy enough to do. But not as easy as if they could fit perfectly into a pocket.

I also had some digital templates that I thought I would incorporate into the album. I had come across the Quick Fix 6×8 Templates over at Pixels & Company quite a while ago, and knew it would be perfect for using in these albums. I can't find that item in their store at all anymore, or I would link you to it.

But you all know I love Kerri Bradford's storyboard templates. With this project in mind, I had put in a request for some 6×8 templates, and Kerri whipped up the Half Pints #1 kit. I feel bad that I never put them to use in this project. But I have another album that I'd like to do at some point, and I will definitely put those to good use.

I'll be back in a few days to share the process of collecting, organizing, and printing four years worth of photos!