The making of an album!

The past couple of weeks have been an amazing journey…
I possibly cannot put on paper the excitement and fun experienced in making a photo album!

It all started off when I shot off the first mail on May 30, more than a month before one of my close friend’s birthday. We (me, K n A) were deciding what we could do different this time. Birthdays had started becoming so predictable. Surprises weren’t exactly surprises anymore….
We were all reaching a magical age and wanted to think out of the box. Something different, something we hadn’t done before, something which would really be a wonderful surprise.
I, for once managed to put my brains to some use and an idea struck!

The plan was to have a photo album / collage of sorts with photos of her ranging from childhood till date. We thought of including all phases of her life with messages from a number of people she knew/ had met in her life…. some of whom weren’t so much in touch too.

The plan was in place and we actually didn’t do much till about 2 weeks before the D-day. It struck us that we had loads to do before we would see our idea materialise into something. Thus started the awesome journey…every day, mails were exchanged. We had almost become managers. Each executing the tasks listed out. Mailing different people, waiting for their replies, mailing them again…oomph!
There were some goof ups in between as well. Like the time when one of them actually sent out a mail to her cousins from her own email ID!! Well, all was part of the game and we thoroughly enjoyed every bit of it.
Evenings we would catch up, discuss on the status and then return back home late, tired but very excited! As the day approached, we realized we hadn’t even started with the album. We had managed to get hold of a lot messages from her family members. That again was a well thought out plan. All operations were successful. One person would take her out of the house on the pretext of eating / drinking out and the rest of us would rush to her place to get hold of messages and photos.
We sure made some bold decisions, like giving the photos to be developed to a shop very close to her place.

We all gathered in K’s house one day before her birthday. We sat writing up all the messages on paper. Yup, with today’s electronic mail being the mode of communication, we all had a good run back of school days with a lot of writing to do. Some messages from people (mostly all e-mailed) were really long. But then, writing had never been so enjoyable :-)
The next best part was to cut the paper into different shapes. We had to give the album a crude and mystic look. This also reminds me of the incident when I lit some paper on fire, just to give the paper edges a different look and I almost ruined the floor …
We in fact googled for “shapes”, the results of which I wouldn’t want to reveal here!!

If cutting paper was so much fun, you could imagine the crazy stuff we did with the photos. We got to chop off photos like never before, infact even got to cut off few people from the snaps…..wow, that was soo much fun to do. We had some jokes, some sleepy sessions, backaches, chips everything to accompany us till about 4.30 AM in the morning. We then decided we better get some sleep. All of us hit the bed and almost instantaneously fell fast asleep. We got up again around 7.30 and started to finish up the album. By the way, that day was in fact our friend’s birthday and we were yet to complete the album.

One of us actually took an entire day off from office and the others half a day. But finally all that sweat and slogging did pay off. The album was a huge success. Its gonna be circulated to each one of our houses for a couple of days cause we actually haven’t got to see the album entirely.

The birthday turned out to be wonderful and the surprise was indeed a great one!