halloween (& other autumn activities) mini album

This is a quick introduction to how I am memory keeping our fall seasonal activities. We are not huge holiday people but I do love documenting the little things we get into each year. And so far, my family has enjoyed looking back through the album. I keep this album with our fall decorations (when I’m not working on it) so that it doesn’t really get looked at until the season swings back around. As September rolls to an end, it becomes a coffee table book. It stays there until the Christmas decorations start to pop out.

In case this is your first blog post here, this is part of an ongoing Foundation Pages Series on the blog.

Read the Travel Mini Album Foundation Pages post.

Read the Christmas Mini Album Foundation Pages post. (coming soon)

so, what are foundation pages?

Essentially, foundation pages are the foundation for your memory keeping project. You’ve got your album’s theme (in this case it’s Halloween) so then you set out the base for the book.

For me, this means plugging in favorite papers and mementos that I know I want to include.

To start, I chose a color palette. This helped keep me on track when choosing supplies to purchase or include in the album. For the most part, I stuck with black and white. Accent colors are also pretty traditional: oranges, purples, and bright greens. Once I locked in my colors and the overall style for the mini album, I pulled out my favorite supplies.

The objective is to stop hoarding my product, and actually use the pretty papers I swoon over. I cut down a few paper packs from Paper Person, Crate Paper, and Felicity Jane to fit into the Life Crafted pocket pages. The ones I know I will be using got placed here and there, about where I think they’ll end up.

Some pages I am unsure of where they will go but at least have an idea of what story they will tell. For instance, I have this great skeleton patterned page that I know I want to use for the year we dressed up as a family of skeletons for Halloween. I know this will be towards the front of the album because it was our very first group costume. That paper pack also came with this very graphic card that simply reads “Hocus Pocus” so I saved it to talk about how I love to watch the movie every year around this time. (What luck that the sequel releases this year, huh?)

my halloween mini album approach

#octoberdaily is one of my favorite hashtags to follow and I truly enjoy seeing those spreads any time of year, but there’s no way I can take on such a project right now. Instead, I pluck out the stories each year that are a little different. My family is very fluid right now. We are going through lots of changes, as well as moving fairly often. Halloween has looked completely different every year. Autumn has meant very different things over the years.

We’ve been sweltering in our costumes, hurricane-d into our home, and snowed in. Those drastic changes are what tend to go into this album. We were only able to go apple picking twice on the east coast. There are many people who look forward to this every year but we’re in Hawaii again, and it’s just not an option here.

This has been a big reason I fell in love with our autumn album.

Anyway, that’s how I memory keep the same two holidays every year. I stick to the changes. The amount the kids have grown in the past year. The random activities we are doing in our new temporary home. Even the weather where we are. It’s been incredible to see so much variation.

I imagine this could only last me a few more holiday seasons, as costumes and autumn activities will both likely dwindle. But for now, this book holds all the cool stuff that happens between the back to school rush and Christmas adventures.

shopping and keeping it cohesive

Choosing the color scheme and album style upfront was a choice I made, to give me something I can work with (and a way to limit myself) over the years. Because I add just a few pages to this album every year, it could become difficult to match after a while. So black and white, while traditional, also made it easier to maintain visual cohesion over the years.

When buying anything new it needs to be for the album I already have in place so that it stays cohesive. Or at least that’s what I have been telling myself, to keep the spending in check. (Happy to report, this actually works, too.)

I know I’ll have to contend with our costume’s colors every year, and this was part of the consideration. Black and white-ing a photo will always be an option. This will flow nicely through the book without feeling as though we lost anything from the story.

a few little elements i love so far

I saw this post on instagram and immediately knew I wanted that little ghost in this album. I recreated it myself with my Cricut but you could absolutely just cut this by hand with a precision knife and scissors. I had no idea what I wanted to use the ghost to hold but luckily, my kids gave me an idea.

We have a couple of Halloween books that only come out around this time of year and I wanted to write about the current ones (you know, before the children outgrow them). So the plan was to write a bit of journaling out on the back of a tag, and slide it into his little ghost “arms”.

Anyway, if you’d like to download the image I used to create this, just click here. The size shown here is about 3.5 inches wide and 6.5 inches tall. I made him without eyes because I knew I would be sticking some on for dimension. I wasn’t sure if they’d be googley eyes or just little black pieces of paper, but I figured I could hole punch if need be.

I got a couple element packs from Crate Paper and added them to my Halloween box just to have ready to go. I printed and cut the images I thought would relate. These are from the Hey Pumpkin pack.

If you’d like to use the October calendar in this photo, you can click here to download it. Mine is Life Crafted sized but you can easily resize it since I didn’t add any crop marks.

adding pages in the future

So, this album is not just for Halloween. It also holds our autumn memories from each year. Many of the things we do every fall are sort of mundane but there is always a standout event. Our first time at a pumpkin festival or running through a corn maze together would be what makes it into this book. This year, we’re heading to a pumpkin patch that also has a sunflower field next door. We all plan on tasting our first grilled sunflowers together. I cannot wait to document that!