All SMASHED Up!

I am not a winter girl!  Thank God I live in South Louisiana where the number of true winter days are measured in days instead of months.  The only redeeming quality of winter is the extra time it allows me to play in my craft room.  Sometimes I wish for more cold, rainy days so I can have an excuse to hibernate for the day!  

A recent play day led me to question, “What do I do with this box of leftover photos from scrapbooking?”  You know - the ones that just don’t fit on the page.  When printing pictures for an upcoming craft event, I always print more pictures than I know I’ll need.  Sometimes its just too hard to decide, or I simply don’t take the time to plan my layouts.  Sometimes they just don’t all fit on a page. Either way, I just can’t bear to throw photos away.  Maybe I'm a junior hoarder.  (I have trouble throwing out all craft related items.)  Or maybe its an emotional thing resulting from my grandma’s pictures disappearing after she passed.  (I used to love sitting for hours looking through that fruitcake tin of old family photos).  

It was time for me to do some type of mini album or smash book.  But not any old smash book would do - especially since I didn’t have a pre-made one in stock and it was cold and rainy outside.  No mad dash to Hobby Lobby in the rain for this girl!  What to do?  What to do?  And then I saw them - the stack of old books sitting on the corner of my workbench!  On a recent thrift trip I had picked up some old books for coffee table decor.  Thrift store find to the rescue! Time to repurpose one into a smash book.

I started by antiquing then decorating the cover.  Since it would end up on an end table in my living room for all the world to see, I wanted it to look interesting.  

Then I began sticking pictures onto pages.  Randomly... In any order... With no purpose.  Can you believe it?  I thought my obsessively-structured self was going to have difficulty with this, but once I got started it was quite liberating.  

After each page of photos, I removed 4 pages to allow the book to close once complete.  I started out tearing them out, but found that an exacto knife worked better. 

I had so much fun making this album.  I filled up the book in a few hours, unlike scrapbooking where I sometimes spend hours on one page.  I also used lots of leftover embellishments (I can't bear to get rid of those either) and found a nice, cute little home for leftover pictures.  And within hours of putting on the end table, someone was thumbing through it looking at those photos that I couldn't bear to throw out.  I can't wait for the next cold and rainy day to do another one!  Did I really just wish for that?