Josh's magnificent photobook

This was an incredible labour of love. First Ian collected all his favourite photos of his son Josh, soon to turn 18. We were very fortunate that Ian's mother offered us a shoebox of photos or it would have been a very small collection. There were 200 odd photos, some in albums, that had to be scanned, photoshopped and reprinted. Mostly the photoshopping was to reduce some of the pictures (to 80% or 50% depending on the room available). Very quick in Adobe Photoshop Elements. Then the photos had to be cropped and scrapped into a 60 page album. I mainly used coloured cardstock with some pattered papers and rubber/acrylic stamping here and there. The journalling was all done on the computer. Wish I'd thought to use the Xyron sticker maker at the start - would have saved a lot of time! Used at least 75 metres of double sided tape sticking it all down. I experimented with doodled borders using coordinating coloured textas, ink pens and my new Signo gel pen in white. One page went overboard and had to be redone (better to stick to the paler of the white pens) but overall it was successful.

I'm a very slow scrapper but it sped up towards the end. There were four or five nights of staying up and not going to bed til 6am or so. Lucky my wonderful husband minded the babies those mornings I slept it.

The key to doing an album, I think, is to try 'grid' pages where you have nine photos or 16 photos on one page, but you substitute patterned papers or embellishments or titles and journalling in some of the spaces to break it up. Also to stick to a colour theme and just a few rubber stamps which you can reuse in different ways, using different colours. I found recyled or chocolate brown papers were the best to use on pages where the colours clashed a bit. You can then jazz it up a bit with coloured ink embellishments / titling / patterend papers. I also found a 'storyboard' plan was very useful with rough sketches and notes for each page.

The printer scanned in the pages and had it bound in beautiful blue leather binding by a retired book binder with gold lettering and a box case. It was expensive but worth it. A cheaper way would have been to do an A4 sized album that I could have scanned myself as there are hundreds of companies who do photobooks now. Maybe for his daughter's album.