Lynda's Wedding Album

This was a project which spread MANY years. It started with some idle chatter over the lunch table back in 2012 or 2013, when I was talking about my scrapbooking and Lynda mentioned she had never received a wedding album, only a collection of all her photos in a binder. Somehow I volunteered to create a scrapbook album for her of her wedding. The problem was then she went on maternity leave (for over a year), then I got pregnant and went on maternity leave (for over a year) and somehow the project still hadn't been completed.

For some unknown reason, I decided to make all her pages as double spreads. This is despite the fact that the only other time I create doubles is for the Gold Coast Show, so getting sketches and layout designs was a challenge.

I then found it really hard to work out which photos to use as I didn't have a connection to any of the people or know their backstories.

I picked Kaisercraft's After 5 collection of papers for the whole album to lend a cohesive feel to the album. The monochrome design worked well with Lynda's wedding colour scheme but I'm not sure if it ended up feeling a bit monotonous overall. Originally I had planned to have different pops of colour on each page, but that didn't eventuate.

I was also a little bit limited in the embellishments I could use, as I wanted to keep the pages fairly flat to avoid warping over bulking flowers or such.

By the time I got around to photographing the finished album I was bit over the whole project, so the photos really aren't the best quality. Now that I'm looking back at the work I put in, I should have spent that bit extra time at the end to show off the work I'd created.

There was a lot of preparation work involved in this album, much more than when I do individual pages. I had to find a whole bunch of double page sketches (you can check out my Pinterest board if you're interested).

I then worked out which sketch would work for each page based on how many photos I wanted to use. 

I then laid down all the large background layers of paper, making sure they were all edged in charcoal coloured ink, before attaching the photos.

Second time through the album was to add any paper embellishments (die cuts, border strips etc) and ribbons.

Third sweep through was to add the dimensional embellishments: chipboard, rhinestones etc.

Like I said, by the time I got around to photographing the album, I was a bit sick of looking at it, so I didn't even take the pages out of the protectors.

It was only after I'd already delivered the album to Lynda that I looked at the photos I'd taken and realised they all had a blue tint to them. I've tried to fix them up a bit with post-editing, but there's only so much you can do.

Anyway, the important thing is that Lynda was happy with the end result and I finally got it finished!