The Twins' Visits PAS & Layouts

For the past 20 years, my nieces and nephews have been coming for visits - weekends, Spring Break, summertime, Christmas. I love these visits and over the past eight and half years that we've been married, Robbie and I have enjoyed visits from all of them! The yougest are our twin nieces (not counting the great-nephew) and they came for their first "official-stay-without-our-parents" visit in 2008. I've scrapbooked several pages from their trips over the past three years, however I still had quite a few photos in my storage binders from these visits since I tend to be snapping photos all the time they're here (and they are so totally photogenic). I decided to create a Photo Album Scrapbook (PAS) with some of the remaining photos.

I found these cute photo albums on clearance at Target and picked up several. I'm planning to do the same type of PAS for visits from our 12-year-old niece and visits from our great-nephew (although he hasn't yet started his visits alone).

I pulled all the pages of photos from the twins three trips from my storage binders and sorted through them. I chose 100 photos for this PAS, left a few photos from each year in the storage binder because I had specific layout ideas for them (3 for 2008, 2 for 2009, and 3 for 2010), triaged most of the remaining photos into my category drawers, and then square punched the last few.

I only added a few "scrappy" touches to the album. First, I added a label and tassel to the spine of the album. I am planning to have these small photo albums displayed in our guest room so that on their next visits the nieces and nephews can enjoy them easily. Second, I included three 4x6 journal cards and one 4x6 card with memorabilia (tickets stubs from our visit to the museum). Here's a look at one of the pages inside the album.

Since I've been spending time with these photos, I was inspired to create one of the remaining layouts that came to mind. I completed this one today based on a sketch from Lisa Day for the Big Idea Festival at BigPictureScrapbooking.com.

I am really loving the way this PAS came out and am looking forward to getting one put together for Pun'kin's visits from the past three years. Watch for upcoming posts showcasing new layouts and another PAS soon.