Scrapbooking small vacation stories

When I come back from vacation, I always make a mini album right away of our 5 Vacation Faves. The next thing I tend to do is pull my favorite photos and scrap small stories for the family album. Sometime later, I work on the final vacation album. I'm not sure why I do it this way. I think I like spending time with my favorite stories before I tell the whole story, if that makes sense.

I've already made my mini of our trip to Glacier this past year, so now I'm working on telling some of my favorite small stories. Here's a couple I just did:

I love the photo of my SIL Melinda with Rowan. I wasn't sure why I loved it so much until I realized it reminded me of the photo on the left from our vacation to Yellowstone 6 years ago. I printed that one and paired the two to write the story of what a great aunt she is. Here's the details:

I decided to go monochromatic with this page. I'm near the en of my August Studio Calico kit, and sometimes I find when I don't have much of a kit left, it's easier to design with one color. The die cut here came from Amy Tangerine Cut & Paste die cuts; it seemed the perfect addition.

A fun little embellishment cluster. Aunt Melinda loves hiking and the outdoors, so to reflect her personality more I held back on my typical amount of embellishing.

Here's the next story I wanted to scrap:

That hill: OMG. You can read the story on the page. The photo doesn't look so bad, but where the arrow points on the page, the incline must have been about 45 degrees, and it was covered in loose gravel. This is the last thing you want to see when you crest the mountain and your jelly-legs are looking forward to hiking the downward slope.

I printed this photo soon after vacation and waited for Fancy Pants Designs Happy Go Lucky to come out so I could scrap it. I knew that this collection would be perfect for our Glacier photos, and I was right. Love it. Here's the details:

The wood veneer title from the Artist Edition collection is just so amazing. I loved adding it to the project. (I'm so proud of those tag bows, too. I am so bad at tying bows normally, LOL!) I picked stickers and tags with words and sayings that seemed to fit the story.

When I started scrapbooking, I learned that when you have weight on one side of the page, you should balance it with something on the other side, ergo my tag cluster here. If you look at the background, you'll see I lay the photo on top of some corrugated paper as well as patterned paper. I like the rough look of it, which I thought looked good for the theme. Note: it's easier to cut corrugated paper with a straightedge and an Exacto knife than with a trimmer, which squishes it. :-)

Thank you for checking out my vacation pages! Now I need to finish the big album...