A Halloween Mini Album

It's Halloween week here at Scraplifters Anonymous!  Can you believe that we are a week away from October?!?  I need to hurry up and get my boys their costumes!  Maybe this week of blog posts will inspire me to get my Halloween on!

You know I have a new love of mini albums and photo album scrapbooks.  This week I'm going to show you all about a little Halloween mini album I put together.  I'm going to let you in on a little secret...I love Halloween, but I hate making Halloween pages!  Gasp! I know, I know...I can't believe I said wrote that out loud.  ;)  But this little mini album is the perfect way to honor Halloween without having to make a big layout every year.

Design Inspiration: There isn't any one thing in particular that inspired my design but there is a person.  Noell Hyman does such beautiful mini albums and I especially love her Halloween esthetic.

Color Inspiration:  Uhhhh...Halloween was my color inspiration.  :)  Black and orange all the way, with a touch of green here and there.

I bought this 8x8 album at Michaels. It has a gray cloth cover and it is a little bit bowed.  Oh well, it works for me.  But it was so bland, and I wanted to spice it up a bit!

I also bought this lace paper at Michaels.  I LOVED the black swirls.  I didn't want the paper to cover the whole front of the album so I cut it to go about an inch past the window.

I laid the paper on top and then trimmed around the window.

And then it was time to stick it down.  I used Glossy Accents, which is an amazing glue.  I got every swirl and glued that paper down like crazy.  And it is stuck!  Days later, my son did pull on a piece of it and pulled it up a bit (he found a spot I had missed).  After I hollered at him (or had a discussion about treating things with respect...or both...).  I'm all about being real. :)  I went back and glued it down again.  And it looks just fine.

I wanted to tie a ribbon around and add a bow.  So I punched a round circle out of acrylic packaging and punched a hole in the middle.

I wrapped the ribbon around the book and pulled the ends through the acrylic circle.  Once I had the ribbon tight and where I wanted it I glued down the acrylic circle.  That holds the ribbon in place.

You can see that the ribbon just wraps around the cover.

For a little bit of added embellishment I glued this frame on too.

To finished it off I tied the ribbon into a pretty bow.

Pretty, huh?!?

But it just needed a little something more.  So I went to the jewelry section at the craft store and found this little beaded trinket.  I just tied it onto the bow and voila...just what the bow needed to finish it off!

For the title block I put the piece of lace paper cut from the window on a piece of gray paper.  Added a sticker and some letters.  I love the depth this gives the front of the album.

Couldn't resist adding a Happy Halloween sticker to the front.  Gives it a little more color.

And here is the finished product.  So happy with how my little Hallow-mini turned out!

I keep my little Hallow-mini in the foyer next to this super cool subway art print from the girls at Eighteen25.  It's looking like fall around here!  Come back tomorrow to see how I organized the inside pages of this little mini-album.

How do you scrap your Halloween pics?  1 page, 2 page, mini album?  Ever altered a store bought mini?  Leave me a comment, I'd love to hear all about it!