BO'S MINI PHOTO ALBUM

In 2013 Graeme and I drove our dog from Scotland to Norway. Little Bo visited England, France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Germany and Denmark, and now considers herself quite the worldly dog. She's explored the cobbled streets of Bruges, and walked along the canals of Amsterdam. She visited my uncle in Bremen, and slept in a king size bed in Aalborg. Though her favorite part was probably all the windmills we drove past, she was endlessly fascinated by them.

I've been wanting to make a photo book from our little trip for a while, and I had actually started one using blurb's software, which is how I usually make my photo books. But after updating my mac's software, the blurb software no longer works and I've lost all the photo books I was working on, including a couple I was making as presents for people. Heartbreak. I've been looking into using InDesign to make photo books, but so far I'm very much in the learning stages so making a page still takes me a bit longer than I'd like. Meanwhile, we got a new printer, and it prints the most amazing photos. The printing process was definitely the most difficult and frustrating part when I made my last album, so this new printer is such a game changer. I only have to print things once. I now want to print everything. I started with a mini album of Bo's Journey through Europe.

So I cycled to a nearby craft shop and got one of those mini Instagram-sized albums. It's small and all the photos are square, which actually made it so much quicker and easier to finish. I think one of my favorite parts about making a photo album (other than having the finished product at the end, obviously), is how you end up reliving that particular trip or event. There were so many bits about the trip that I had forgotten about, and it all came back to me when I was going through the photos. I didn't do any stamping this time (other than some dates scattered around), but I kinda went to town on my photos with alphabet stickers. One of my original ideas was to use maps as backgrounds for journaling, but instead I ended up making some backgrounds in Illustrator and printing them on card, which made the whole thing feel a lot more cohesive, and meant I ended up with a bit of a color theme throughout.

I was a bit unsure of how to end the album as we didn't take many photos once we reached our destination, so ended up with this photo I took of the road map we used and our route highlighted. I'm so happy to have this album finished, and sitting in my bookshelf!