beijing shopping | Almost Never Clever

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!

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A friend of mine asked me what I wanted to shop for in China. Paper, I said. Paper, really? Yup, paper.

People think I’m a weirdo when I want to shop for paper products on vacation. I’m not looking for scrapbook stores but random interesting paper that I can make into something. Remember when I tried to by blank papyrus in Egypt last year?

I came away with lots of goodies! The picture above is several big sheets of paper with pretty designs. It’s actually supposed to be used as wrapping paper. However, this stuff is heavy duty, very unlike flimsy American wrapping paper. It’s probably not acid free, so no scrapbooking with it. I’ll definitely make something cool though!

Next, I picked up pretty postcards and notecards. There were a bunch of cute paper/card shops on a neat street called Nanluoguxiang in Beijing and I had to stop in each one.

Of course, I ended up with a stack of pretty tickets from the sites we visited. Some of the tickets even double as postcards! Clever!

Finally, I snapped up this blank little book. It’s small, just a few inches square. I have a really cool project in mind for this little book. Stay tuned!