Hi there, Erin here with another post about pocket scrapbooking.

I have mentioned it before, but one of the things I LOVE most about pocket scrapping is the fact that you can easily scrap so many pictures on one page.  The grid design takes the guess work out of making my layout and allows me to focus on really getting those memories down.  That thought struck home to me again this month as I worked on finishing up scrapping our vacation memories.

Now a little back story so you can understand what I am talking about!

My husband and I realized after we had our first child that vacations would never be the same again.  We used to single-mindedly drive (or fly, or ride, or whatever) to our destination where we would then relax for the allotted amount of time before heading back home.  Children, especially young children, just do not work that way.  They cannot sit in a car for 9 hours without letting you know just how BORED they are. And relaxing at a resort, not going to happen, at least not with my kids.

So our family decided to start planning our vacations where they actually consist of a series of mini adventures and activities sprinkled with rest times.  It is actually really fun and allows us to experience a number of things that we might not otherwise have done. We take so many pictures on vacation now that I started making separate 8X8 Vacation Albums, because in order to get all those memories down it ends up taking several double page spreads (and by several I mean 10-20, sometimes more).  I usually add one or two simpler pages in our yearly family album to highlight our vacation, but not in the same detail that our vacation albums have.  One way I do this is by condensing several separate activities or stops into one layout or double page spread.  This is also a good technique for combining a variety of activities that you do not have many pictures for.

When scrapping our vacation this year, I included each stop and adventure in our mini vacation album as a separate page, but for our family album I just did summary pages instead.  I had a lot of pictures that did not make it into the Vacation Album that I really wanted to use, and when I mixed them in with some key storytelling pictures I really liked the end result.

This is my layout for out road trip portion of vacation.

Because I had so many pictures from our various stops, I went with a double page spread, and to keep the facing pages cohesive I used the same templates flipped around.  I decided to use pictures we had taken of the different signs for parks and rest points to mark our different stops instead of writing them in and I followed a linear pattern in displaying the pictures so that the pictures from the each stop follows the identifying sign.  I also incorporated the help of my children in choosing which pictures best represent and help them to remember each of our little stops along the way. They LOVED it!

This layout represents 5 different stops we made and each of those stops has its own double page spread in our vacation album, but, by condensing them, I can fit all these memories into our family album in one spread.

I LOVE Pocket Scrapping!