Sweet Brownie Queen: First Anniversary = Paper

We celebrated our first anniversary on Monday! This last year has been wonderful and flown by!

I made an album of photos of our first year. When I started out, I had no idea that the traditional first anniversary gift was paper, so that worked out really well since the whole album was made of paper!

I made/designed the entire thing - cover, pages, everything. I was so excited and really happy with how it turned out. I finished it last Friday and it was so hard to keep it a secret until Monday.

I did a couple of trials, under the ruse of making a baby book for my brother and sister-in-law. That way I was able to try out different things, and have them out in the open. Now I have 2 pink books I may or may not use - I might just start over - but they will get a pink book!

I had spent about an hour browsing my favorite scrapbook store for the right paper and color scheme. On that first trip I bought the cover paper, distress ink and the keys (which say love, memory and heart). I was not sure if I was going to use both olive green and cream papers, so I bought both. I ended up going back for 30 pages of the olive paper and a few cream pages. I used distressed ink on the paper the photos are mounted on, and I liked the way that set the photos off/away from the pages, so I didn't use any of the cream paper. I even found a pen that matched the distress ink. As I have said before, I love it when things match!

Now I want to make my own albums for everything!!!! It takes a lot of time though - gluing the pages together and doing the distressed ink on the edges was rather tedious. So worth it for the final product!