Guest Designer: Michelle's Vacation Mini Album

Today we are pleased to share a wonderful creation from our "Viewer's Choice" Winner of the recent CutCardStock Challenge: Michelle McClure.  Her tie card wowed all of us and you can find lots of other creative works from her at her blog A Page Out of My Book.  Her guest post today shows how she created a fantastic mini album to celebrate and keep the memories from a special summer vacation!

Vacation Mini-Album

My very favorite item that I worked with were the Brown Bag A7 Envelopes. I just love that semi-circle cut out on the flap. I was working with them at a crop, and another cropper took the label right off the packaging so she could order the same item later at home. 

I wanted to create a project that would showcase the envelopes and matching invitation cards. I decided to make a mini-album in which the envelopes would be the album pages. I bought an empty 3-ring album that measured 9 x 5.5" for $2 from Big Lots which I decorated with some Echo Park papers.

The A7 envelopes and invitations are the perfect size to fit inside the album. I just hole punched the envelopes, slid the matching card inside and decorated all the surfaces. 

Each envelope highlighted one attraction from my vacation. An envelope and card set has six panels, so there is a lot of room for photos, souvenirs, journaling cards, postcards and brochure cut outs. This is just the front of the envelope and card. 

Here is the complete view, which includes the inside and back panels.

Here are two more pages featuring two different attractions:

 

This shows the inside cover which has the trip itinerary and first page of the album. I found this to be a more sturdy take on the traditional paper bag album. 

 

I ended up using every piece of memorabilia I brought back from my vacation. When I make 12 x 12" pages, I hardly use anything I brought back as the postcards and literature detract from the aesthetics of the layout. The brown bag album has a much more casual air so I didn't have to worry too much about layout design. The purpose was more about documenting the trip. There was also so much room that every single photo and every piece of literature and every souvenir fit somewhere in the album. This was a really fun project to work on.

Thanks so much for this opportunity to be a guest designer,

Michelle