Our friend HC sent in these images to bring us up-to-date on her quest to make all her holiday gifts this year. We showed another project from HC in a previous post that you can see here.

So my latest obsession is this Kolo Riva photo album. I love the way the embossed-frame pages set off my photographs. I've put together several as Christmas gifts already. Seems like a good year to give less-expensive "comfort gifts," so I'm cleaning out my drawers stuffed with photos (still in the developer's envelopes!) and finally getting them into albums.

This one I made for my mother-in-law, who at age 86 traveled half-way across the world to visit Hong Kong with my husband, his sister and me. It was an incredible adventure, and we wanted her to have a souvenir photo album to remember it by.

I took a couple hundred photos during that trip, but culled my favorite 30 representative shots for this brag book. A matching Kolo Hudson photo album will house the rest.

This is the first Riva with black pages that I've tried, and it's perfect for the colorful Hong Kong photos. It was fun to journal on the pages, too. Accidentally dropped a tiny blob of the silver ink on a page, but a little working with an X-Acto knife and a black Sharpie fixed it.

I'm feeling a little guilty about how easy it's been to put together these albums. It feels like an album this nice should be more work. These come together so fast I can't believe it.

For more photos of this project go here.

- Ugo