Mini Album Topics?

I see mention of mini albums a lot. I made one once for my mom for mothers day. It was an ABC book of her. I would like to try one for myself but I'm not sure what topic or events I should do. I am curious as to what topics/events other people use for these. Will anyone share with me?

I think that rather than decide to make a mini album and then come up with a topic, it works better to let topics come naturally and see whether any of the stuff you would scrapping anyway would be suited to a mini-album.

My mini albums include a short trip to Chicago (6x8), a friend's wedding (8x8), a summer camp from high school (12x12 format, but only 9 pages long), a toilet-paper roll album about really mundane everyday stuff (2 1/2 x 4), a 3x4 mini for my husband with pictures of the two of us, a 7 page 6x12 with some pictures from my childhood with a common theme.

My ABC album (with pictures from my own childhood and youth) isn't very mini, other than the unusual page size (6x12) - it's 30 pages long. My book of me is 6x8, but it's 26 pages long; so is my Countdown to Christmas album, also 6x8. I have several 8x8 albums that I wouldn't consider mini because of their length.

My mini-albums are usually topics that would take way too many 12x12 LOs in our family album. I made one with pictures from an overnight stay at a local hotel with a cool pool setup. One was with all of the pictures from our multiple summer trips to the local amusement park.

My new favorite way of creating mini-albums are the Simple Stories SN@P line of 6x8 albums. Last fall I made one with the pictures from our multiple trips to a local apple orchard and other fall activities, and another one was made for our weekend trip to MN and the mall of America. I'm getting ready to start one about our garden this year.

• HuskerMom98 Said:

Ah, see, for me that means I end up doing an entire separate 12x12 album. I'm not sure what my standard for too many layouts is, though; Hawaii was 30 pages, DC was 60 pages, and St. Louis was 54 pages, and those were obviously separate albums, but last summer's trip to Chicago was 12 pages and those all went in the regular album.

That said, those trips that needed their own albums also got 1 or 2 additional pages to be placed in the regular album to serve as a brief summary of the highlights.

I'm making mini's for my granddauthers for halloween at Disney, I also did one for their disney trip. I have one mini I did that was just Christmas picture. How about a favorite memory? I did one for my daughter in law for her run in a 5 K she ran. Really anything works for a mini I love love doing mini's!

My minis have been trips and I did a "what I love" mini. It was divided into three sections (the album, part of a class, had 3 tabs): people, things, activities. I took pics of silly things like my dishes, a stack of DVDs for the things.

I've done lots of minis, but usually for other people: for my friend's 40th birthday, another of her holiday out to us in Singapore, and a couple of star books for friends I made when we lived abroad.

I've only made 2 for myself: of a day out my husband and I took to an arboretum in the autumn (too many glorious tree pics for the big albums) and my first mini was actually a scrapbook of a scrapbook. My first album ever was for MIL and FIL of their ruby wedding anniversary celebrations. I made the mini for myself with the photos of those pages, and journalling detailing how I did it, and why I chose what I did. I actually love that first little mini. I learned a lot from it.

• RedSquirrel Said:

I love your idea of making a mini album from the photos of the mini album you made. I think I am going to do that with the ABC album I am making my best friend.

Halloween, weddings, trips, etc.

I did a mini album as a gift for my good friend for the 20th anniversary of our meeting. I am considering doing a mini for my son to show some cool pictures from his week a surfing camp. I also would consider a mini for a vacation like a family trip to Disney World.

Yeah, see, I can't wrap my head around that - anything too big for my regular albums would be too big for me to do in a mini-album either. I'm fairly certain that the fewest pages I've ever done for a family trip is 12 - bear in mind that when I say "family trip" I just mean me and my husband, I'm sure if we had kids they'd necessitate even more pages per trip.

I like mini albums because they are something I can easily finish in a few hours and I feel like I've accomplished something. I do a lot for gifts and stuff too.

My regular albums are 12x12 chronological and I usually don't do more than 1-2 2-page layouts per topic. If a topic was going to be more than that (maybe 3-6 2-page layouts) I might do a mini album for it. Other than wedding and honeymoon, I can't imagine doing a full 12x12 book on any single topic.

• aquabunny Said:

My regular albums are mostly like that, 1-4 pages for any given event, but I can't imagine doing a multi-day trip in anything less than 6 2-pagers, and if I turned something even that short into a mini-album it would end up as an insanely long mini - it took me ten 12x12 multi-photo pages to scrap the Missouri Botanical Garden, and that was just a few hours of a five day trip.

Good for you being able to curate your photos and stories! I can't do a 5-6 day trip in anything less than 30 pages, sometime double that! (My 12-page trip to Chicago was just a day and a half.) So my trips are almost always entire separate albums, with a page or two summarizing them for the regular album. (But then, I've scrapped baseball games that were so delayed by rain that they were cancelled... Curating is not what I do! )

I do a lot of mini albums for my girls (granddaughters) so that they can take them to school.

I usually do separate albums for trips and stuff like that too. I don't scrap chronologically, so I usually do smaller albums of events, or mini albums for mini events, or for gifts.