2012 Instagram Mini Album

It's always fun finishing a project, especially one that's been hanging around a bit longer than it should have. I started this Instagram Mini album back in January and just finished it on Wednesday. I'm happy it's done and happy its found its place on the shelf of all my other albums.

I decided to make this album because I wanted some sort of record of my first full year of sharing photos on Instagram. Sure some, if not many are in my Project Life album but I wanted a place to see some of my favorites all in one place.

I really didn't like the idea of hunting and pecking through my icloud feed to pull the photos so I opted to use this utility that Persnickety Prints has on their website.  It grabs all of your photos from Instagram, (you can even specify a date range if you like) and sends it to you in a nice .zip file. The beauty of this utility is it also gives you the date you uploaded the photo to Instagram. Because I planned to date each of my photos this bit of info was key for me

Once I got the .zip file and extracted all the data I decided to divide my photos into folders by month so it would be easier to weed out the photos I wasn't going to use. I limited myself to 16 shots from each month because that's what would fit nicely on the page size I had planned.  I went thru each folder deleting what I knew I wasn't going to use and kept editing down until I had 16 photos. Some months were definitely harder to edit than others.  I did save the original zip folder so I wouldn't actually loose any of the deleted photos so if that's of concern to you, you may want to do the same.

Because I was pressed for time and heading to a crop in two days to start working on this album I opted to print my photos at Costco. I made myself a 12 x 12 template and sized the photos to 2.5" square. This allowed me to easily fit all 16 on one sheet for each month. It might have been more cost effective to have 4x6 prints done but I didn't want to risk any cropping issues so that's why I did the large size. I had them printed on the glossy paper and I was really pleased with how they turned out. The template I made is available for download here.

I also created a small 4x6 contact sheet of each folder by using the print screen function. This way I had all the date information for each shot in one spot. Here's a picture so you can see what I mean.

For the actual album I used a really old 8x8 chipboard album that I had on hand. I have no idea who's it is or where I got it but you could certainly use any album for this project.  I opted to keep the album in its natural chipboard state and just decorated the spine of the album. I cut little strips of colored paper to mimic the color strips on the Instagram Logo and attached a 2012 piece of flair I had in my stash, nice and simple.

 

I made the title page using a piece of Dear Lizzy 5th and Frolic paper, I loved the aqua colored arrows. I laid down two rows of pink striped washi tape, this tape came in a set of four from Target. I cut the Instagram on my Cameo, using the free font Billabong which is the same font they use based on my Internet search. The 2012 is Studio Calico Darling Dear wood veneer alpha's, and the arrow is from Freckled Fawn. I embossed the 2012 veneer pieces with Zing Neon Pink embossing powder and the arrow was embossed with Zing White Opaque embossing powder.  The 'my year in' alpha is Jillibean Soup Alphabeans in Tart Teal.

On the back of the title page I added a cute saying I had seen online, I just typed it up using a typewriter font and added the IG logo. I printed this out at home on a piece of 36 lb. white vellum.  I also decided it would be fun to include the number of photos I uploaded each month so before I deleted any I got a count.  On a PC you can do this by selecting the first photo, right clicking with your mouse and then select the last photo making sure all of them are highlighted and if you look down at the bottom of your screen in the detail window it should give you a count.  I made myself another template and listed all of that info and printed it on the same 36 lb. white vellum and I left the back of this page is blank.

I opted to make this album the same throughout simply to make the process easier.  I went with 8x8" square pages and cut tabs out on my cameo using a aqua triangle printed paper. I stamped each tab with the month and a little dashed line using this set of Cocoa Daisy stamps. The pink dashed line was stamped using the Hero Arts Neon Pink ink pad. I attached all of the tabs and then decided to mist my pages. I used Heidi Swapp's Mint Green color shine spray and misted both sides of every page, masking off the tab each time so they didn't get misted. I spritzed about 3 pumps on each page and didn't worry much about any sort of uniformity.

 

For the date labels of each photo I cut cream textured cardstock into strips and then cut each piece down to roughly 2.5'x1.5'.  I rounded two of the corners and inked the edge of each card using the Hero Arts Neon Pink ink. I stamped each date with a rolling date stamp and black ink.

I laid down strips of the same washi that I used on the title page along the middle of each page and attached my photo and date cards in a grid pattern overlapping on to the washi tape strip.

The most time consuming part of this project was misting each page, and making the date cards. I ended up cutting one piece of the 12 x 12 cream paper at a time and making all the date cards that I could.  I rounded the corners, inked the edges, stamped the dates and laid it all down. When I ran out I cut another sheet of paper and did all the steps again. I found if I worked this way it kind of broke up the nasty parts a bit.

I won't show the inside of the whole album but at least wanted to give you and idea of how the whole thing looks. 2 pages front and back for each month and two extra pages at the beginning and it filled up the album nicely.

All in all it was a fun project to do and its fun to look back on the photos from that year. I'm sure I'll do something similar for my 2013 photos, I'm just not sure yet if it will be the same idea. I might try a photo book or something digital, who knows.

Note: I just want to add that all the links I shared above are for informational purposes only, they are not affiliate links.