For A Little Girl

Today I'm going to share a project that I worked on in fits and starts last year, in between wedding planning and decoration making. The trouble with projects like this one - and I'm sure you've had the same - is that although the idea forms early on, say, with a new collection (Crate’s Emma’s Shoppe, in this case), the execution of it is slow and spread out, and even worse, the date on which it can be made public is far away because it’s a gift being made well in advance.

Emma's Shoppe was made for little girls

I gave this mini-album to my best friend’s daughter as she turned two. It’s empty, ready for mummy and daddy to fill with cute pics and tales of their princess. Of course Emma’s Shoppe was perfect for this. 

I chose the gatefold design to take advantage of the husband's binding services

I loved making this album - even though I find it almost impossible to pre-make albums. All my pages and minis are designed around the photos, so whenever I sat down to work on this project, even though the concept was there, all my ideas went aaaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhhhhhhh! and ran away. It took me ages to get over that, and to get over the feeling that I was somehow leaving it unfinished.

this reminded me of my books when i was a little girl

I'm sure she doesn't need a book to tell her this!

You wanna know the best part about this project? Better than the thought that went into it, how beautiful it is, or how the little girl will be fascinated by the different layers and pages? Better than all this is the fact that my husband has a binder at work. One day he looked at what I was making, and knew what I wanted to do with it. He knew what a Bind-it-All was before I even had to explain and - get this - offered to bind the album for me! So one day in November he was seen entering the office with a cute floral stack of papers, taking them to the binder, punching them and binding them together for me!

a gatefold with varied layers makes for an interesting book for a little girl

I took many more pictures - because I loved the paper collection and what I did with it. But I also hope to see the princess soon and see what she and her parents have done with it :-).