Simplify Your Vacation Scrapbooks with Photo Albums

Our family recently took a vacation to Disney World, which of course produced a massive amount of photographs for me to scrapbook! Instead of creating a huge and involved (and time-consuming) traditional scrapbook for this vacation, I decided to take a slightly different approach: an embellished photo album!

I'll take you step-by-step through the process that made making this vacation album stress-free, fun and fast!

Buy a photo album. I chose a red leather 2-up photo album with space for journaling on the side and a cut-out in the front cover for a photograph or title. The album holds 200 photos, which I decided was a sufficient amount to capture the essence of our trip!

Plan an album outline. Since it was a Disney trip, I divided the album into five sections, one for each theme park and one for our resort. I also planned a title page, as well as a "table of contents" at the front of the book and a sub-title page for each section.

Choose your photographs. I chose about 200 (maybe a few more, maybe a few less...I didn't use them all in the final album) of my favorite photos from the trip: the ones that really told the story of what we did, who was there, what we saw, and how much fun it was! Then I had them printed as 4" x 6" photos.

To introduce each section, I also printed 6" x 8" enlargements of photos of our family in front of each park. You can do this by either cropping an 8" x 10" photo, printing a 6" x 8" photo yourself, or digitally cropping a photo to 6" x 8" and then placing it on an image canvas that is 8" x 10". I chose the third option and trimmed the blank white border off the print to create the 6" x 8" photograph.

Arrange the album. When all my photos arrived, I began arranging the album. To do this, I took over my kitchen table, dining-room table, island and countertops in order to have space to lay all the pages out. After dividing my photos into piles (one for each park), I then began laying out two-page spreads putting the photographs in the order I wanted them to appear in the album. As I went along, I added Post-it notes as placeholders for title pages, embellishment cards (in place of photographs), memorabilia, etc. I continued shuffling, planning and making notes until all 200 slots in the album would be full and I was happy with the story told.

Add photos to the album. Next I added the photos and placeholders to the album (because I certainly couldn't leave them all over my kitchen while I worked on the album). This made it very easy to work on the album a little bit at a time, without creating too much extra mess. To accommodate the enlargement photographs, I cut them in half so they became two 4" x 6" photographs and slid them into the photo sleeves.

Decorate the cover. This could be saved for last, but having the cover of an album embellished helps me get excited about filling up the inside. I used the cut-out opening in the album to create a Mickey Mouse-shaped head and added the album title. Next I added some polka-dot ribbon to the spine.

Design the title and sub-title pages. Since the album would be primarily made up of photographs slipped into photo sleeves, I spent most of my time and energy designing and creating the title and subtitle pages.

Keeping the title page fairly simple, I chose to make a Mickey Mouse head silhouette and added puffy polka-dot alphabet stickers to create the title.

I wanted each sub-title page to be a paper piecing design of an iconic landmark from each park, so I chose the castle (pattern available here), giant ball, sorcerer's hat, and the living tree. Each title (or sub-title page) was made in 6" x 8" format, and then when it was finished, I cut it in half, making two 4" x 6" cards that I could slide into the photo sleeves.

Create tabs to separate the sections. With the sections clearly defined by title pages and the photographs organized to correspond to each park, I wanted an easy way to flip from section to section. So I decided to make tabs to stagger at the top of the album using polka-dot paper. I then color coded the center of each tab and labeled each section. In addition to glue adhesive, I used a stapler to staple the tabs directly to the album pages to ensure they would stay put!

Add journaling strips. The next step was to cut and adhere solid-colored cardstock next to each page of photos to use for my journaling. I could have left the journaling lines as they were already printed in the album, but I didn't like how the word "memo" was printed next to each photograph, so I opted to cover it all. Adding cardstock journaling strips also allowed me to further color-coordinate the sections of the album (ex. red for Magic Kingdom, orange for Epcot, yellow for Hollywood Studios, etc.) to match the tabs.

Write the stories. Next, I went through each section and began writing my journaling directly on the journaling strips. I hand-wrote everything to save time and printing. This step took several days, so I just picked it up whenever I was feeling like writing. I did try to do it soon after the trip so that I could remember as much as possible.

Design and insert embellishments. There were still a few empty slots left for embellishment cards in the album, so that was the next portion to tackle. I ordered several Disney-themed stickers to coordinate with the rides and characters we saw. Then I simply cut 4" x 6" pieces from colored cardstock, added a sticker or two, drew a border and hand-wrote a title. I created all my embellishment cards in only an hour or so, while watching a television show. Easy, simple, but still adds a great punch to the album.

Make a table of contents. Last, but not least, I filled in the table of contents page of my album. I had several paragraphs of journaling I wanted to include to summarize each day and section, so I decided to create flaps for each day from 2" x 12" cardstock. When you open the flaps, you see the journaling about that day. I used alphabet stickers and a hand-drawn border to title each flap. Of course, the cardstock flaps are also color-coordinated to match the corresponding sections throughout the album.

All in all, this was a very easy album to put together and it came together quickly. It was also easy to work on a little bit at a time. I kept all the coordinating papers, stickers, and photos together in a folder and just pulled it out whenever I was working on the album. It's a great process for creating albums for vacations and events that yield lots of photos and journaling.

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