Seeing Santa Mini Book

I love a great Secret Sister program.

I mean, I help run the entire SNAP Secret Sister so when I was asked if I’d like to participate in the crafty Secret Sister being organized by the Cricut team, I was in! I happened to personally know the girl that I was assigned and immediately knew that I wanted to do something special and meaningful for her. While I can’t reveal just yet who she is because I want her gift to be a surprise, I can say that she and her husband have a young kidlet with the potential of more to come. A Seeing Santa Mini Book seemed like a perfect place to keep all of their treasured photos with Santa in the years to come.

Materials:

Cricut Air
Cricut cut files (decorative elements and tags)
assorted card stock, cut to 5″ x 7″
coordinating decorative papers
adhesive (tape runner and permanent)
standard hole punch
2.5″ circle punch
binder rings

Helpful Hints:

To go step by step through every page I created would take forever, so instead of boring you to tears, I’m going to give you some helpful hints for when you make your own *plus* I recorded a video that shares each page.

1. While you can absolutely copy my layout as it is, please feel free to make this your own!

2. For each spread, the left page has the number associated with the year plus space to write any notes or stories that you’d like to remember. The right page is perfectly sized to hold a 6×4 photo with plenty of extra space as a border.

3. I added two decorative sheets of Cricut’s gold vellum within my mini book to break it up visually. Top them off with a larger image cut with the Cricut and they’re good to go.

4. Don’t be afraid to have the tags expand outside the cover of your book. It adds interest to your book!

5. If the card stock you use for your cover isn’t very heavy, or has an ugly back to it, cover up the other side with a piece of patterned card stock. Problem solved!

6. I used a tape runner for the majority of the project, but used the permanent tape when attaching the circles with the dates. The glitter card stock was much heavier and I wanted to make sure they didn’t budge in years to come.

And here’s the whole Seeing Santa Mini Book: