Making a new kind of book...for me

As someone with the time to investigate variations on a theme (thanks to a broken foot), I've found myself staying up late watching craft tutorials by women who make what are called mini-albums.
They're called mini because they're so much smaller in dimension than regular sized scrapbooks, which all seem to be 12by12 inches. The minis are almost any size and seem to come in all dimensions.

I have a lot of paper, both commercial and painted...and handmade and I'm looking for ways to tell stories visually with really economical real estate. High-rise sort of things. In fact, I've been working badly on a scrapbook version of my MFA thesis with little success or interest primarily because I'm not using the material in any innovative way, not really. Also, my scrapbooking skills are crap. Who knew one could have scrapbooking skills?

Of course, a good page is all about design: main focal point, harmonic colors, interesting composition, etc., but I'd been slopping paint on the large (12by12) pages with so much speed I had to wonder if I wasn't afraid of taking my time.

So when I stumbled across the mini-albums and realized just how much material: photos and writing and patterning, etc., one could get into a relatively small place, I was hooked.

I guess it's been almost two months (synchs well with broken foot) since I started the process of learning such things as the "hidden hinge" vs. the "stacked deck" binding approaches --- both are pretty cool--- and how to put together a three and four-page album (stick with coordinated paper) plus discovering which youtube tutorials are worth watching and re-watching, I'm turning into a reasonable student of the art.

Putting together "pages" (which I'd think of as signatures) requires a lot of thinking ahead, as does how the one page might work with the two or three others.
It's very easy to screw up as well, and there goes a whole set of nice paper. My first one wound up with so many mistakes, I had to take most of it apart for recycling. The second one was structuring correct, though very messy. I'd used the ugliest scrapbooking paper from my stash of not much paper and turned out quite an ugly little book. But by then I was busy figuring out the binding mechanism, so beauty didn't matter.

This week I finished an album with photos of dog, Lille and sister and brother-in-law, who helped me through the foot surgery. If I can wheel the package downstairs, I can get it in the mail!

I have one photo and here it is.

 and my foot!