Hello, It’s Andrea, and today I want to share with you this mini album that I made, using the June Hip Kit Club kits, to document a trip to Coronado Island and a lovely day at the beach! Every year we try to go to Coronado Island, right off the coast of San Diego, California, to lay on the beautiful shore there in front of the gorgeous Victorian Hotel del Coronado and go swimming! This has become a bit of a summer tradition for us and I love it!

We haven’t been able to go yet this summer but I know we will soon and while I wait for my day at the Beach, I thought I would make a cute and simple mini album to document our trip there last year. It was a fun way to both dream about my upcoming visit to the beach, and to reminisce about last summer.

Now, when I call the mini “simple”, I certainly don’t mean boring…I wanted to make something that would be bold and beautiful, vibrant and filled with color and summer style but that would be small and fairly quick and easy to make. I chose to make the mini 5 5/8 by 5 1/8 (with all the pages that size) so that the process of making it would be uncomplicated and could go smoother and faster.

However, I did decided to spend a little bit more time on making this mini a bit more special and one of a kind by  creating a few hand-painted patterned pages to go in the album. I used the white cardstock from the Cardstock add on kit and painted them with some Goauche paint.

For the rest of my mini album, I simply cut down all the pattern papers from the kit, used a transparency with a vellum picture for the cover, a piece of thin chipboard from some of the packaging in the kit (the blue and white striped one from the exclusive puffy stickers) for the back, and I bound them all together using my cinch to make my mini album. Oh, I also included some full page pictures in there too (also 5 5/8 by 5 1/8).

Once everything was cinched together, I decorated all my pages. I used different embellishments from the June main kit and embellishment kit…the exclusive pieces, the wood veneers from Jilibean Soup, the buttons from Pink Paislee Fancy Free, the ephemera pack from Becky Higgins Project Life, the metal buttons from Simple Stories, etc..

I made little layouts on the patterned paper pages using small, 3×4 and 3×3 pictures plus the embellishments. I also embellished some of the big picture pages. I also used the June Hip kit die cuts to decorate my album (the ones I designed 🙂 )!

And to put my own special touch on the mini, I did some stitching and added in some vintage ephemera pieces from Coronado Island (vintage beach pics, a vintage mermaid, vintage postcards, a map of Coronado Island, etc).

I think the mini came out so cute and colorful and it didn’t take to long to make…plus making it was so much fun, it was like a day at the beach documenting my day at the beach!

I hope I have inspired you to make such a mini to document your summer days at the beach too!

(Note: all the vintage ephemera pieces are from my own collection of vintage ephemera and are not included in the kits. The transparency and the cinch spiral piece used for the cover of the album and to bind the album are also my own and not included in the kits. Everything else used to make this mini can be found in the June Hip Kit Club kits).