Quick & Easy Little Mini Book

I needed a quick little mini book for a retirement gift and I only had one night to make it. (I prefer to think that was because of my busy schedule, rather than my tendency to procrastinate.) Given that I only had one night and was starting after my LSS had closed, I needed to use supplies I had on hand. Fortunately I had a line from My Minds Eye that was black, white, and gray. This made it super easy to add a  little color with my distress inks in order to coordinate the papers with the logo color of the intended recipient's employer.

Click image to bigify.

Here are some tips to make a super quick mini book still look fabulous. I think I might have spent more time finding and printing the photos than I did putting the book together!

• Use border punches to give the edges of the pages texture for interest.
• Ink the edges of the pages with distress ink to coordinate it to your theme.
• Further coordinate the pattern paper by over-stamping it with accent and background stamps (I used a favorite flourish stamp).
• Convert all of the photos to black and white to give it a unified and coordinated appearance.
• Coordinate embellishments like flowers by misting them in a coordinating color and then adding a background stamp pattern to it.
• Add die-cuts and simple theme embellishments to dress up the pages. In this mini I incorporated the mini film strip and the film strip die cut from Tim Holtz since the pictures were from a TV commercial production we'd worked on together.
• Mix up the page sizes by binding in journaling cards that tell the story.