I’ve never made a mini-book before. Funny, right?
I wanted to do some sort of fun project about all the food we ate on our trip to China. I started by taking a picture of everything we ate, beginning on the plane ride. Mr. P and our friends were gracious in not touching anything on the table until I got a shot of it – they even reminded me to take photos!
Shopping in Beijing, I found this awesome little book.
I printed the food pictures as 2-inch squares when I got home, and then left a 1/8-inch white border when I cut them out.
I was a little concerned that the thickness of all the photos was going to mess with the binding of the book, but the finished product is actually pretty cool!
I sat in front of the TV with these supplies and went to work.
I used a date stamp to stamp each page with the date the meal corresponded to.
Then I taped in each picture and wrote a few words.
I also wrote divider pages for each city we were in.
Not bad for a first attempt? I like how minibooks have an effortless look, so I hope I succeeded.
I’ve included a bunch of pages below so you can look at them. I used over 80 photos, so this is just a sample!
Almost Never Clever 
Love, love, love this! You are so inspiring 🙂
Thank you!! 🙂
Very nice! You have BEAUTIFUL handwriting 🙂
Thank you! I’m still getting comfortable with using more of my own handwriting and this was a good exercise.
What a wonderful idea. Love the book. Your handwriting is beautiful so you should use it as often as you can.
Aw, thanks! I like seeing my mom’s handwriting through the years, so I think I should handwrite more just for my own future kids.
Oh you should!!! I always say as long as your handwriting isn’t chicken scratch then you should journal with your own handwriting in your scrapbooks. None of my scrapbooks have computer generated journaling in them. I’m not that fond of my handwriting either but I get tons of compliments on it so I guess its not so bad. I forgot to mention to you that I linked your blog to my post on This is how I do it since you were the one that inspired me to write that post. 🙂
yes! I saw that and forgot to reply and say thanks 🙂
I think I’ll still do a mix of typing and handwriting depending on the look I’m going for.
I’m sure whatever you do it will be beautiful 🙂
Fabulous idea! I’ve never traveled long enough to have an entire book devoted to food (how LUCKY you are!) but I love this idea. And what a fun find. Love that kraft paper book! 🙂
I think even a weeklong trip would give you enough food to do a book. I just so happened to find a large book and had enough pictures to go in it 🙂
Love it! Simple and beautiful. I really like the idea of chronicling one thing from a trip like this. Great idea. And as someone with chicken-scratch handwriting, I still hand-write most of my journaling (I used to type lengthy journaling). Are you going to add your thoughts on the food (i.e., loved it, gross, surprisingly tasty)?
Yes, I actually added some thoughts to a few of the pages where I felt like saying something. I’m not sure if I included any of those in this post. For example, there were a couple of things we ate that we couldn’t tell were chicken, frog or something else and I noted that and what we thought of it. I also noted which were our favorite dishes (we had 3-4 favorites).
Nat this is fantastic! I love the simplicity of this book and I think I will try this on our next trip 🙂
Great! I’d love to see your take on it!
Absolutely LOVE this idea! Have to try it on my trip to China and Tibet this year. Just think 30 days worth of food pics will be too much for an album with printed pics, so maybe a digital version!
Sounds awesome! I’d love to see it!