As I take a mini maternity leave after having my baby boy on September 18th, I have a series of talented friends/guest posters who agreed to fill in here throughout the rest of the month (and into October). I will try to pop in with random posts here and there, but we are just trying to squeeze out every bit of goodness of family time right now. Enjoy!

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Hi everyone! I'm so excited to be a guest on Amy's blog and I sure hope that by making this blog post, Amy can enjoy her little one just a little bit longer! Thanks Amy for trusting me. :)

Ok, so most of you probably don't know me. I'm Marie and I am a memory keeper! I live with my two daughters age 3 and 5 and my husband of 13 years and sometimes, I admit it, even though I want to record memories, life gets fast and I don't get to it. That's what happened to our two recent trips to Disney. I was full of good intentions but all the ephemera are still sitting in a bag and all my photos are in my computer. How sad is that, right? So we just came back from a trip on the west coast (New England) and I decided that this time, I'd DO something with my pictures BEFORE the memories fade away. It took a lot of time and efforts and willingness to do it, but I made time for it and today I am so much happier because in some years I'll be able to look back at this mini book and relive the wonderful and precious moments I had with my little girls.

Let me show you my process of making a vacation mini book.

Choose an album. When I first started scrapbooking back in 2008, I was making pages and mini books. I liked the mini books because, unlike my big album where I was adding a little random stories, the mini books were containing a whole story of their own. What I didn't like about them though was that they were bulky and they didn't fit with the rest of my albums on the shelve. (I used to bind my mini books with a spiral spine.) So I figured that if I'd find small albums to make my mini books, I'd have the best of both worlds. There are plenty to choose from and this time I went with the Heidi Swapp Chipboard embossed binder album. The album is about 8x10 and is filled with divided page protectors and dividers.

Gather the photos and ephemera. I take pictures all along my trip with my camera AND my iPhone. My camera will take better quality pictures while my iPhone takes pictures that I generally share on Facebook and Instagram as I take them for my friends and family to enjoy. So for every event of my trip I have both format of pictures: the 4x6 good quality pictures and the 4x4 iPhone photos which also include little details that I didn't get with my big camera. I love all my pictures and I mix them as I build my album.

During my trip I also gather business cards and paper stuff that I find on the way: maps, paper doilies, restaurant menus, postcards, even ribbons and fabrics.

Gather the supplies. When I do a mini album I know that I will need a little bit of patterned paper, especially because my album is full of pages already, I know that I won't need a ton of extra paper. For this album I chose the 5th and Frolic collection by Dear Lizzy because it goes well with the pages that are already in my album and because I love the soft look of them. So I just grabbed my bag of scraps that I have from past projects.

I also love to use frames and small labels to write bits of journaling on my pictures.

Finally I got some alphabets that I thought I could use while working, not forgetting that I also like to use alpha stamps and knowing that I can easily go get some more as I work.

Actually I can go grab more of everything as I work so I don't worry too much about what I brought to my table.

Choose the approach. How am I going to tell my story? On a daily basis? On an event basis? For what my trip was, I decided to tell my story day by day because we did something special every day. I would rather tell the story event by event if there would be lots of traveling days, or lots of beach and pool days or repetitive things. On our trip we did quite a bit of pool and I just mixed these pictures and displayed them all together on one day so that I wouldn't have to many pool pages in my album.

Choose and print the pictures. I chose my pictures as I scrapbooked my trip, a little bit at the time. I started with the first day, printed everything in the format I wanted it (this takes quite some time, especially if you're using divided page protectors because you have to think of the size you need for each picture). Using some frames also bring other photo sizes in the game and it's a lot of thinking and figuring out how things should be displayed. I print my pictures at home and I love that because I have them right away and I can do a little bit of crafting in between the printing sessions. I have 100 pictures total in my mini book. It's quite an album! :) Here are a couple of photos of my pages:

Supplies can be found online from Two Peas in a Bucket and Simon Says Stamp. To see the entirety of my mini book and some detailed shots, hop over to my blog. I guess the secret for making a mini book of a travel happen is to get to it right away! :)