Top Secret!

I am working on an album for my husband and I anticipate giving it to him in October for our anniversary.  I should've done this for our first anniversary (that's the paper one, right?), but I didn't, so I'm doing it now.  It's just a little album highlighting from the time we met until present.  

I am using a 12 x 12 spiral bound black scrapbook.  I love this style of scrapbooking.  I know that those plastic sleeves are there to protect your memories from the grubby fingers of time, but I'm entranced by the tactile nature of the open pages.  Seriously.  I love to feel all the bumpy letters and the flocked stickers.  

I'm not going to show many pages of this album, but there are two so far that I am fond of.  I have wanted to do this next one for many years and am so excited to finally do it.  We have three photos of ourselves together where we both look really good and they were all taken in our first year together.  The first was taken in New York during the weekend that we decided to be together, the third was taken on the monorail in Las Vegas on our way to my sister-in-law's wedding, and the second was taken on my first trip to California where we picked out our first apartment.  Anyway, the photo is called "Dog Beach," because that is where we snapped it.  To memorialize it, I recreated the beach using sandpaper, fuzzy dog stickers, and bubbly wave stickers, as follows:

 Do you see the one dog sniffing the other dog's butt?  That made me laugh.  I don't think my husband will appreciate my potty humor, though.  Oh and the other two dogs were not meant to be humping -- just playing -- but it didn't turn out that way, I guess.  Anyway, the only thing I am missing for this layout is a picture of our dog to add to the mix.  

The next page I am sharing was from our trip to the Bahamas for my sister's wedding.  We did one of those off-the-boat snorkeling excursions.  They got us all set up and gave us these little feed bags of fish food and then instructed us to never ever ever ever open the feed bags under the water.  So what does my husband go and do?  He opened up the feed bag under the water and the fish swarmed.  He screamed, I laughed and it is one of my favorite memories of him.  So over the years, I've been collecting little stickers and embellishments to use on this page.  Here's a snippet of it:

I changed the color saturation in the photo and used some matching metallic purple paper to represent underwater and then I just stuck fish all over.  Pretty fancy, I know.  

Anyway, that's what I've been secretly working on.  Hopefully it will all come together.  I printed out photos through Shutterfly many many moons ago and I only printed out the first two years, so I still have five years to cover, which includes new pets, engagement, whale watching, marriage, new house, and baby.  Phew...I hope I have enough pages!