Made From Scratch

Here it is. My vacation album from our Sanibel Island vacation. I am finally finished with this. It was a labor of love. I loved making every single part of it from the memory making vacation to the last stitch in the album. I handmade each page with the sewing machine.

The front cover was something I visualized doing a long time ago. It was a perfect look for this beach vacation album. My favorite part of this album is the handmade glass seahorse. It was a found vintage item. I found it in a huge stash of vintage jewelry I purchased at a garage sale this summer. When I saw it I thought I'd never use it. Isn't it perfect for this album. It actually reminds me of a part of our trip when Cole saw a seahorse and was completely intrigued by the seahorse. I love that I was able to use it on this album.

I purposely left spaces for my sons to put their memories into this album. I didn't want to hand write on this before I took pictures. I am a big chicken like that.

I also used items from our vacation in this album. I like having these items incorporated into the album because I think years to come it gives a sense of the times. I also think they provide information that you might not think of incorporating. One of the pages I used a tide chart from the days we were there. The tides were important to us because when the tide is low is the best time to go looking for shells. We made sure to get out to the beach at low tide so we could hunt for the best shells and so the boys could walk out to the sand bar.

This album took a lot of time but the great part was that I didn't get overwhelmed by it. I didn't post all of it. The album is quite a few pages long. To prepare to make this I took all the bits and pieces I wanted to use a long with the papers that matched my color scheme and made a kit for myself. This saved me a lot of time searching through stuff. I used what was in the kit I made for myself. I took everything from my stash and bought next to nothing new (only a few journaling tags). I am actually really excited to make more of these albums and am starting to feel like I am learning what my style is as a scrapbooker. I owe a large part of this to Donna Downy because she rocks and she was an amazing teacher.