The Pink Mini

Good morning all!

Welcome to Day 3 of my self-claimed mini week :)

Today I wanted to share an album I developed for BasicGrey in celebration of Scrap Pink. For those of you that don't know Scrap Pink is the scrapbook community's way of raising money and awareness for Breast Cancer Research during the month of October. It's such a wonderful celebration and I really enjoy being a part of it.

For our contribution this year, BasicGrey had me develop an exclusive album for retail stores that would just be available for Scrap Pink celebrations. They asked for a project celebrating friendship, and for me that couldn't have been easier.

I'm so incredibly fortunate to have had my best friend in my life for (she'll kill me for saying this!) 20 years this coming January. (Excuse me, I just fainted!) This mini was the perfect way to document some of my favorite memories/quirks about us. She deserves an entire book for putting up with me this long, trust me, but it was wonderful starting with this!

This project uses BasicGrey's Perhaps line (so soft and feminine) along with their adorable scalloped mini. And since this class was going to be a fairly short one, I wanted to avoid some of the fussy cutting that would be involved if I covered the album in it's entirety around all those scallops. I decided to leave the scallops plain and focus on the center of the book, so I made everything with a square base to fit right in the middle.
But as I hate leaving things looking "unfinished", I came back at the very end and added a little inking and pen work as you see here to dress it up a bit. I also used my Crop-a-dile punch to put holes in the center of the scallops for a lacy look.
Again, I'll tell you I love making things as easy as I can so I used alot of punches here - circle punches, heart punches - anything that could speed up the process. I came up with a basic pattern and then just varied it from page to page for interest.
You can see by looking at these pages, I just kept flipping my photo page and journaling page every other time throughout this mini and just changed a few things around. It really makes the process much quicker and then a mini can be a project you can finish in an afternoon.
And because I love texture, I added a few things with dimension to my album from the buttons to the ribbons and a few chipboard pieces, but nothing to elaborate. I wanted to keep it fairly simple.

The end result ended up being a cherished keepsake and something I look forward to giving Ann Marie (once I get it back)! Thanks again for letting me share and I hope if any of you get so motivated to create their own albums this week, you'll share it with me by posting a link here.

Happy Grey's Thursday, all!