Handmade Gift: Personal Photo Journal

One of the gifts that I gave Brian this year for Christmas was a photo scrapbook of us. It pretty much chronicles our adventures and the places we've visited together in the past 2 1/2 years since we've been together. I wanted to make something personal with photographs but not just photos in an album.

I filled my flash drive with 100+ photos and got them printed at a locally owned photo shop downtown. I opted for a matte finish and added white borders around each photo. I think that printed photos look best that way. I hate the way super glossy digital printed photos look; no depth and sometimes even blurry.

When I went to find a book to display them in, I couldn't find the album/journal that looked so nice in my mind. I went to three small local boutiques but they only had really small journals and as a last resort I went to Target who only had albums and scrapbook journals with plastic coverings for the pages and that was something that I really wanted to avoid. A light went on in my head and I went to a big name craft store and purchased this hard covered Canson spiral bound field drawing book with really heavy pages and it was perfect! Double points as it was made in the USA.

I had originally intended to attach the photos to the page with black photo corners but these have to be placed absolutely perfectly in order to not look messy, which isn't exactly my style. I like things in a more hap hazard, lay as they fall way. After some experimentation with with this awesome 1/4" black masking tape that I used with almost every fashion school project, I found a happy medium. The pages turned out minimalist and symmetrical within themselves but I placed every page differently so the viewers eye would bounce around a bit.

Only about a quarter of the photos that I printed were attached before Christmas, so I still have a lot more work to complete this section of the book. I plan on adding more photos every year to chronicle our times together. Below are the pages that I've finished so far, showing the first 8 or so months of our relationship from July 2008 to March 2009 including a road trip to Savannah, Georgia and a visit to my sister in Fort Lauderdale. Oh, and Brian absolutely loved it!