Completed: 27 Things Minibook

Posted on July 21, 2009 by elizabeth

So back on my 27th birthday, I wrote a list of 27 Things to Do While I Was 27. Yesterday, I finished the minibook I’ve been working on for a few months documenting my progress through the list. Having a list of goals for the year, some silly, others more serious, has been a lot of fun. I didn’t finish everything on the list, and that’s okay. I’m really proud of this little book, and I’m sure I’ll love having it when I’m older as a time capsule chronicling my 27th year.

Because it’s more fun to see the book in person, I’m only posting photos of my very favorite pages here. I blogged about the minibook a few months ago, though, and you can see a few more pages over there. These minibooks are quite possibly the most fun thing to make ever.

Minibook: 27 Things

Posted on May 20, 2009 by elizabeth

Back in July, I wrote a list of 27 Things to Do While I’m 27. This week, I started working on a minibook to chronicle each of the items on that list. I’ve been writing about them here (sometimes), but I love the idea of having a tactile record of this year.

The thing is, though, that this was entirely inspired by Elise Blaha’s similar list, which I saw referenced on another craft blog I read (although I can’t even remember which one). When I first saw Elise’s list, I was reeled in right away. I already had the list written, and even better, I’ve been wanting to stretch my creativity in different ways. And honestly? I think scrapbooking in its traditional sense is a little hokey, but Elise’s minibooks are scrapbooks that appeal to me much more… they’re organized but not overly so, full of nice paper, and heavily feature photos. So I signed up for her April Get Crafty workshop, and I’m loving the results of putting her ideas into motion.

Here are the first few pages I’ve been working on (click through to flickr for more details and links to the original blog posts!).

Minibook: Shea Stadium

Posted on April 15, 2009 by elizabeth

I signed up for Elise Blaha’s Get Crafty workshop, which started on Monday. Along the same lines as my kickstart photo project, I’m hoping this workshop will get me thinking in a crafty frame of mind again. I finished my first project last night, and I’m so happy with it… not just because I like how it turned out, but because it was fun to put it together: cutting, gluing, stamping, all of that jazz. I’ll admit to being pretty skeptical about the whole scrapbooking phenomenon, but the workshop is sort of scrapbooking outside the box, and I can get behind that for sure. It’s more collage and papercrafts and photography all together, which is right up my alley. Plus! It was an excuse to buy things at the craft store and Staples, things that would normally count as “unnecessary” like a date stamp (!!!) and markers and cardstock and labels and shipping tags and new scissors.

The book itself is a collection of photos and memories of my seven trips to Shea. (The full sets of photos are over on flickr.) I printed one photo from each game wallet-sized, and wrote little bits about what I remember most about each game (or rainout, as the case may be). This is especially cathartic as the Mets begin their season at CitiField, which promises to be gorgeous, but is still in need of some memory-building.