Finished family vacations album!

Finally, after what seemed like a year (but in reality was probably closer to two  months), I have wrapped up the family trips album. Previously, I posted photos of pages I had done of Los Angeles and a high school trip to Washington, D.C. The remaining pages consisted of a D.C. trip in college, for a wedding, and a pair of Colorado vacations that I took with my parents when I was in junior high and early high school. Those particular trips had few photos and little information written on them, so it was hard to determine exactly where they were taken and when, but I patched together a general set of pages with a few memories.

Here are layouts from the second D.C. trip, which, in addition to the wedding, included visits to the Newseum and the National Holocaust Museum:

This intro page shows a few of the D.C. monuments on the left, 

as well as a picture with family members of the wedding party.

Here we have a layout dedicated to the wedding itself.

I wanted to keep my layout for the Holocaust Museum 

dark and simple.

The Newseum had lots of interesting exhibits outside. 

I don't remember if cameras were off-limits inside, 

but the outside pictures were all I had (above and below).

This D.C. trip was by car, and on the way back we stopped in Columbus, Ohio, to visit my best friend and her family. Here is a layout from that overnight excursion:

Finally, here are the pages from the Colorado trip, which I didn't like as much as the other trip layouts because of the lack of content. But hey, at least it's done, right?

A simple lead-in page.

I actually liked this layout because of the paper (Stampin' Up!) 

and these were some of my favorite pictures from Colorado. 

My dad gets credit for the close-up of the deer on the left.

It was the late '80s, early '90s, so I decorated 

the page accordingly. :-)

The last page of Colorado and the last page of the book. 

(I decided not to do this one in chronological order.)

I'm still trying to decide what my next project will be. I'm thinking about doing the reunion trip I took to U of I back in April with my old roommates Sara and Heather and our friend Stephanie. But I also have prints for some smaller projects that I'm tempted to knock out before I start a larger one. (The reunion is enough to fill its own book.) I'm also planning to scrap the photos and memorabilia from our actual college years, but I'm searching for a scrapbook with the U of I seal on the cover. I've seen them, but I'm having trouble tracking one down for some reason. I'm excited to start that project, though. My college memories are some of my fondest, and I absolutely love reliving them. 

D.C. discoveries

It's been a while since I've been able to devote a meaningful amount of time to the family vacations scrapbook, but I have been able to complete, in bits and pieces, the section with photos from a trip I took to Washington, D.C., with my parents in 1994 to attend the Washington Journalism Conference. I was a senior in high school at the time, and I spent about five days at the conference while my parents stayed with friends nearby.

My plan is to create similar lead-in layouts for each trip, and since I have two D.C. trips to scrap, I made the one below as a lead-in for both, similar to the Los Angeles lead-in, then I created one specifically for the '94 trip (see second photo).  

For the remaining layouts, I used a mix of D.C.-themed paper and a few stickers here and there, but for the most part I let the photos and journaling dominate the pages. I'm realizing the further I get into this massive, long-term scrapping project that I'm going to need to simplify my layouts if I want to make steady progress.

On the final layout, I felt the need to try being clever, with the "Quite imPRESSive" headline, putting emphasis on the "press," of course.

I still have two sections remaining -- a 1997 trip to D.C. for a wedding and a pair of Colorado vacations from the early 1990s with only a handful of pictures between the two of them. I don't think it will take long to finish once I have some time to dedicate to working on it. And I'm feeling more motivated and organized after spending my early November staycation stripping photos from all of my old, sticky-page photos albums and sorting them into storage boxes. It took three and a half days to empty the albums, but I feel much more prepared to tackle scrapping projects because I remember what I have in the way of photos, and I've been able to give some thought to how I might want to approach scrapping them. Reliving old times in my life has also fired me up to tell those stories through scrapbooks.

Sun sets on L.A. project

The first of my old-photo scrapping projects is officially complete! I wrapped up the Los Angeles section of my family vacations book this afternoon. It spanned about a dozen double-page layouts, which means it's overflowing from the album I put it in. I need to add pages to accomodate it and the three other projects that must fit in that book. For now, though, I'll just share what I've done, minus the two layouts I posted previously:

Tinseltown

With the cupcake crawl album finally finished, I took a short break to regroup and figure out what to tackle next. I've been feeling like I need to dive into an old-photo project, and I have a generic travel-themed scrapbook that I bought a while back and never found a use for, so I decided family vacations was the way to go.

I have pictures from several trips, although nowhere near all the trips we took when I was growing up. (I didn't start taking my own pictures on vacations until I was in my early teens, and I've decided, for the sake of keeping things as simple as possible -- for now, at least -- not to delve into my parents' vast collection of trip photos.) The vacations I have to scrap include two summer voyages to Colorado, a Los Angeles trip and two treks to Washington, D.C. Since I wrote on the back of all my Los Angeles prints (and since I love California and am excited to scrap all the beach photos), I'm taking on that one first. Here is my intro layout and the layout from our first L.A. stop, Hollywood:

I'm keeping these layouts pretty simple for the most part because I don't want the scrapping process to take forever for these older pictures. In many cases, the quality of the photos won't warrant special treatment anyway. I like having the chance to use the themed paper for the trip locales, though.