Hats and More Minibooks

I've been busy this morning as I knew the weather was going to be better this afternoon. Hopefully I'll have time for a walk later. I have made a couple of minibooks in my crafting session. All the photos are quite small so they fit well into a flip book made from one sheet of 12x12. 

Most of the people in the photos are dead now so the book is a record of who's who in the older members of my side of the family.

My husband's family do not have any old photos of previous generations. He is one of 5 children living with their parents in London's Islington district. He and his brother shared a bed, and his three sisters shared another. They certainly did not have any money spare for photographers. The family was moved out of London to Aylesbury which is where I met my husband, but that's another story.

I think black and white photos are so much clearer than colour. You can see every fine detail in the faces and clothing even though the images may be old. Personally, I think it's hard to scrap old photos. You need to be sympathetic to their content,  not be too modern in the choice of papers, make room for names (and stories if you know any!) and try to let the photos speak for themselves.

I just love the hats in old photos! Isn't it a shame we rarely wear hats now? Usually they're worn just for weddings these days, yet I think they are lovely at any time. Look at these 1930's hats. The ladies' Sunday Best I'm sure! Dad's written on the back of the photo 'Mr Watson School Master at Sunday Church Outing'. He can't remember the place, date, or the ladies' names, but I'm  guessing one is Mr Watson's wife.

I also made a small fold up minibook documenting Dad's working life. He worked in an Ironmonger's Shop from when he left school with the only break being when he was drafted into the RAF. At 18 he was made the manager, although he thought he was too young for the job! I remember going there as a young child and watching Dad serve petrol and paraffin to customers - he tells me the petrol was 1shilling (10p) a gallon in those days! He later moved from the shop in Woburn to the premises in Woburn Sands where he was manager for 33 years before retiring with ill-health. Both shops are still there today, but the Woburn store was taken over and now sells china. To keep both minibooks safe I made a slipcover to keep them in.

So now I hope there's time for a walk before tea, but I don't have a hat to wear for my Bank Holiday Promenade!

Easy Minibook

Recently I’ve been re-organising the pages in my scrapbooks and naming each book to make it easier to find specific pages. The inspiration came from reading 'The Big Picture' by Stacy Julian http://stacysbigpicture.typepad.com/  a couple of years ago but it's taken me this long to get around to it! And having taken the time out to do that chore, I’ve discovered something interesting, well it’s interesting to me! I have only 3 pages out of six albums that have just one photo on the page.

I must admit, although I enjoy trying new techniques on my pages, and love playing with embellishments just like everyone else, I do like the photos to tell the story and usually keep any journaling to a minimum. As I scrapbook using only 12x12 pages, there’s plenty of space for multiple photos, and it seems, that’s what I do - scrap multiple photos on a page.

I have recently inherited some old photos of my sister and I when we were children in the 1960’s. These photos are very small, typically 3.5x 2.5 inches, and would be lost on a 12x12 page. It’s taken me a while to come up with a solution to the problem but this afternoon I made a mini book and a slipcase for it to live in, which I think does them justice.

I must apologise for the image quality of the minibook photos. As mentioned in my last post, my daughter has the memory card from my camera with her in Italy, so I had to find her Canon SLR and give that a try. I know serious photographers prefer an SLR if they can afford one, but all those buttons, I had trouble working them out!

By the way, I’m the child who appears on the front cover and without her shirt!

My supplies were very few: I used a sheet of red card, a sheet of black, one K&Co paper, a flower punch and black cord (saved from a gift I received).

It was a very quick and easy project, taking under two hours, and I enjoyed doing something other than my 'usual' scrapping format.