Eye On Design {Balancing Mini Albums}

Hello, everyone! This is Melissa, and I’m here to kick off a week of focusing on design with Pink Paislee.

Balance, especially visual balance, is a concept that many scrapbookers are already familiar with when making layouts, but it can be more difficult to apply this principle to mini albums.

Or is it?

The biggest challenge I face when making mini albums (and the biggest reason they become unbalanced) is that I’m often tempted to start with the first page and totally complete that page before moving on to the next. This may work for the first few pages, but eventually I start to “lose steam,” and pages toward the end of the album start to look less embellished and less polished than pages at the beginning.

In other words, the album becomes unbalanced in terms of the amount of “stuff” (stuff in this case being techniques, words, or even actual physical items such as paper and embellishments).

How can a scrapbooker combat this challenge? The best way I’ve found is to work on all pages of the album at the same time, using an assembly-line style process that performs the same step on each page in turn before moving on to the next step (which is then also applied to each page in sequence).

Take, for example, a recent mini album I made using the new London Market line. I had already selected 11 photos before I started, so I knew I would have 12 pages total, including the cover. I had also already decided to use shipping tags for the pages holding smaller photos and that I wanted to back the larger photos with a paper mat that would stand as its own page. I started the actual process of assembling the album by laying out all the tags and photos on my desk, arranging them until I had what looked like a balanced flow from page type to page type.

During the next few iterations over the album, I went through each page and added stamped images (that I heat embossed with silver embossing powder), then selected die cuts for each of the tag pages, and then finally added a doily layer behind each of the larger photo pages.

I finished off the album with four more rounds of work- one to add layers of patterned paper behind the doilies and photos, one to go through and actually adhere everything onto each page, and then the final two rounds involved adding machine stitching and then finally a few clear rhinestones.

The result of this process was a completed mini album that was balanced from beginning to end in terms of design and the amount of technique and supplies used on each page.

Pink Paislee Products Used:

London Market – Addington 00629
London Market – Curiosities 00630
London Market – Notting Hill 00631
London Market – Mayfair 00632
London Market – Kensington 00633
London Market – Royal Charm 00634
London Market – Ephemera 00637
London Market – Clear Stamps 00638
Indigo Bleu – Bitty Blocks 00628

Other Products Used:

Shipping Tags
Binder Ring
Silver Embossing Powder
Watermark Ink
Clear Rhinestones
White Thread
Baker’s Twine
Doilies