By Sandi Genovese
Tribune News Service
Summer is approaching and you know what that means — lots and lots of photos. Now that phones have evolved to include camera functions, I’m likely to take photos of everything from a summer vacation to a tasty treat at a favorite restaurant.
Trouble is, I don’t really enjoy my photos when they are just sitting in my phone (or in my computer), so I decided to create a simple mini scrapbook to hold a handful of my favorites. Turns out it’s as easy as the purchase of a sheet of wrapping paper, a piece of foam from the craft store and a couple of bottles of acrylic paint.
Construction of a mini book is simple. Cut the wrapping paper into an 8 1/2-by-25 1/2-inch strip and accordion fold it in 4 1/2-inch increments. Fold up the bottom 2 inches to result in pockets that are the perfect place to hold 4-by-6-inch photos.
Decorate the front cover with embellishments to match the theme of the photos that will sit inside. You can customize the cover with a handmade stamp by simply cutting foam into the desired shape, sticking it to a wood block or plastic stamp mount and applying paint. You’ll be surprised at the amount of detail you can achieve by shading the paint directly on the foam, then stamping it. For extra texture, I stamped my pear onto a recycled page from an old book. Trim around the stamped image, fasten it to the cover and add a title for a pear-fectly good mini scrapbook that can be completed in minutes.
Although it is handy to use my phone to take the pictures, it is wonderfully old-fashioned to select a half dozen of them to print and save in a little book that will probably outlive my phone and maybe even myself.
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