last day of June!

Can you believe it??! I surely can't. It's so hard to believe that we're into our 6th week of summer vacation. Yes, I said 6th week! Holy cow, where is the time going?? I knew June would fly by with our trip to Michigan, my friend Becky visiting for almost a week and then my trip last weekend. Usually we don't do much in the summer for this exact reason ~ I don't like summer to fly by. I like it to last and last and last. So, we have about 5 1/2 weeks of summer vacation left and I'm sure we will spend it in the pool, at the beach and going to the movies. Ahh, summer fun!

Anyway, while I was at my scrappin' retreat last weekend one of the top things I wanted to finish was my Michigan trip album. I took a few hundred photos and while I didn't have to scrap every single photo there were quite a few that I wanted to keep and scrap (we visited with many friends & family we hadn't seen in a while). But I also didn't want to have 10 layouts on our trip. So my solution was a regular 'ol photo album, the kind that has 2 photos up and down. This one holds 160 photos. Perfect.

So this is what the album looks like on the outside

Simple black photo album I bought at Target and decorated with some ribbon and a seashell charm. Now I know our trip wasn't about the beach but I thought the seashell fit with the "summer vacation" theme anyway. I also added a travel sticker in the photo window from Little Yellow Bicycle.

Inside I arranged all the photos first and then added more travel stickers and journal tags from Little Yellow Bicycle traveler collection.

I love that the stickers had Day 1, Day 2, etc stickers so you could follow our trip chronologically in the album. I also added some papers from the Making Memories passport line. I had some scraps layout around from a kit I bought last year so it was nice to be able to use those up.

I didn't worry about vertical photos being the "wrong way". This album was meant to be simple.

When I had more than a line or 2 of journaling I tucked the larger journaling tags behind the photos

This splash pad we took the kids to was so much fun. We essentially had it all to ourselves, there were only a few other people there because MI schools hadn't let out for the summer yet. Note to self ~ next trip make sure it's early June! The splash pad had 3 slides, a bunch of interactive water spouts & faucets that the kids could turn on and off, and a huge bucket that would dump water all over. And I mean it dumped all over! On the other side of the area it had a bigger pool with 2 big waterslides. We discovered that Olivia loves waterslides!

I put the stickers right on top of the photo sleeve instead of on the photos so if I decide to take the photos out or do something different with them they're not ruined. Also, the stickers seemed to come off fairly easy when I needed to move something. Now, this may not be the case after a year in the album but I'm not worried about that.

I found these cute little license plate embellishments from Karen Foster at a local scrapbook store in Helen, GA.

And that's it! Just a few pages from the book but you get the idea. Now I will probably do some kind of collage layout for my family scrapbook, probably just a 2 pger. But the bulk of my scrappin' is done for this trip. I hope this inspires you to get those vacation and travel pics scrapped. It doesn't have to take long. I did this book in a matter of a couple hours. And now my kids can enjoy looking through the album!

You can also check out another idea over at just Laura's blog. I always love her ideas She did something similar with her travel pics. I'm actually in the process of using some of those same 12x12 divided sheet protectors for my extra Disney photos.

Happy end of June to you all :)