Dad's Garden Party Photo Book

Hello there!

It's been a minute, I know. Summer is always a full season for me--it's the time I tend to take vacation with my family and July especially is filled more birthday celebrations than I can tend to keep up with. This summer was no exception, and I spent most of my July especially crammed with plans (not that I'm complaining!). 

My summer vacation for this year was spent at Myrtle Beach with my family in celebration of my dad's 60th birthday. We finished out the week with a big garden party bash at my grandparents in honor of dad's birthday. I wanted to create something special for dad to memorialize this birthday so I did a little experimenting and came up with a new style of Ink+Honey Mini Instax Photo Book. 

(And a round of applause for my dad that did his best to stage and take photos of this book as I forgot to do it before we headed home to Tennessee!)

For one, this photo book is significantly larger than the typical Ink+Honey Instax Mini Photo Book...which are typically mini. I wanted to create a book that could hold lots of photos and not become too thick. I knew this needed to be bound together with a Secret Belgian Binding stitch so I had more control over the thickness of the book so it wouldn't bow out with the amount of photos inserted.

So...I combined the Secret Belgian Binding with a modified Gate Binding that folds open almost like a trifold. Or, if you are not a bookbinder and have no idea what that means, suffice it to say, it's like I combined two books together that can be read on the left and on the right. And if that didn't make sense, hopefully you can see what I did from the pictures below.

We set up a photo booth in my grandmother's garden where our party guests could have their photo taken, insert it into the book, and write a short note beneath. 

It was a really fun challenge for me to dream up an idea and experiment. The thing about experimenting is that there's no guarantee it's going to work out the way you anticipate, so you just kind of cross your fingers and play. I was pleasantly surprised by how this turned out and am thinking of offering a few for purchase in the Ink+Honey shop. What do you all think? Let me know in the comments!

XO,

Abigail