When I started scrapbooking a couple of years ago, almost all the pages I made were single-photo layouts. Now that I’m scrapbooking all of these hiking photos, however, I find myself trying to cram as many photos as possible on every page - there are just too many views I want to remember!

I try to cull my photos at several stages in the camera-to-scrapbook process (actually, the eye-to-scrapbook process - I’m becoming more and more critical of what I choose to photograph. With a digital camera it’s way too easy to just snap away like mad, creating more work for when you get back to the computer. Bah!):

1) Looking through my photos in Lightroom, I delete the obvious losers (blurry, grainy beyond salvation, major exposure failage etc.) altogether, and then flag the ones I want to upload to flickr. Our flickr account is where we share our photos with friends and family, and I like to think of it as a backup in case all our hard drives crash or the house goes up in flames or something. I only edit the flagged photos.

2) Now comes the hard part - choosing which photos to scrapbook. I make an effort to include photos of us and our hiking partners on every page even if it means dropping a nature photo I love, because I think they will be more interesting to us in the future. I think I’m going to make a simple album with my favorite nature photos so I won’t have to worry about forgetting them.

I also save some photos to use for non-event, non-chronological scrapbook pages - instead of including this photo of JK and the pups on the Tuck and Robin layout, I’m going to save it for something else. Maybe a page about my favorite things? Or summer memories? Or how freaking cute my boys are? I store multiple usage photos like that one in a digital Library of Memories system.

3) Now for the actual scrapbooking part - I like to choose one or two photos to emphasize what I want to remember about the trip (these tend to be nature photos), then squeeze in the rest as supporting actors.

Since I am generally too lazy to come up with new, exciting designs all the time, my layouts tend to look very similar to each other. Case in point - the Tuck and Robin page looks a lot like the Mount Baker page I just made, and the Tank Lakes layout is based on a design from Cathy Zielske’s Design Your Life class that I have already used on another page…and quite frankly the two layouts in this post look almost the same. I don’t care; I’m just happy to be scrapbooking and getting these memories down on paper.

The first couple of times we went hiking, I ended up making several scrapbook pages from each trip - if I had kept this up, my shelves would be full of not-very-interesting albums. I definitely prefer this more succinct (if I can use that word about photos) style of memory keeping, especially since I don’t really have room for many albums in our house to begin with. Maybe we should just build more shelves :o)

We just went through a very wet and cold period here in Washington, so we spent our time hanging out with friends, eating delicious food, going to the movies (500 Days of Summer, Julie & Julia and Harry Potter (again) - all of them excellent) and scrapbooking (well, I did, not JK).

Since I have no original ideas these days (and that’s ok!), I stole Karla Dudley’s design (the digital pattern paper is also from Karla Dudley, but it’s a paper layout - I printed the background on cardstock before adding the photos) for Das Toof. I love JK’s photos from that climb!

I made On Top of Old Smokey to participate in Erin’s challenge over at Write.Click.Scrapbook. last week; I used one of my blog posts for the journaling. Easy and lazy, that’s how I like my scrapbooking!

About a week ago Christina left a comment here, so I moseyed on over to her blog to look at her pages. I was so inspired; not only does she have a lot of camping and hiking layouts (yay!), but they’re so fresh and full of life! Since I’ve been a bit bored with my simple layouts lately, I decided to try to make an 8×8 page inspired by Christina’s style.

I had a lot of fun making this one, it was refreshing to not just follow my same old structure. I think I am going to keep this up for all my hiking layouts from this year to make a little 8×8 album, I fell in love with that size when I made my desert scrapbook this spring.

Digital was definitely the way to go for this one as I could do it all while my sick self was planted firmly on the couch. Luckily, said sickness seems to be disappearing very quickly; the fever is gone and my throat is almost back to normal. This is very good news for our weekend plans, so now I am just crossing all crossable limbs in the hope that the weather will cooperate - I am very excited about this trip!

Ok, this is driving me crazy - I couldn’t decide whether to put “making lemons into lemonade” or “turning lemons into lemonade”. Hrmf. If you feel strongly either way (the rest of The Intertubes seems to be undecided), let me know so I can change it before printing. Aah, the joys of digital scrapbooking!

Things are amiss here in the gray land of coffee and rain: Seattle broke it’s all time recorded heat record today by reaching 103 degrees. Gaahk! Our house is 94.3 at the moment and my viking body is not happy about it.

It’s pretty much too hot to do anything else but go swimming or collapse naked in front of a fan, so I went for one of the least active activities I could come up with - scrapbooking! Unfortunately the upstairs office (where all my scrap crap lives) was baking in the sun, so I had to drag some paper and supplies downstairs. I quit after this one layout because the process of cutting things was making me sweaty and, as it turns out, fans and paper don’t mix. Sure felt good to make a page again though. Scrapbooking, I missed you!

This is a lift of a page by the wonderful Jessica Sprague from the September issue (I love how you get the September issues of magazines in July) of Creating Keepsakes. I got to use my new favorite font, Reuse by Quickutz.

I’m off to go take a cold shower (and I should probably force the pups in there to cool them off a bit) and then go to the movie theater to take advantage of their air conditioning. When it’s cold outside you can at least put on more clothes; this is torture!

As part of my big plan to fix all the little (and big!) things I have neglected in my life during the Great Depression, I had all four of my wisdom teeth extracted on Monday. Finally. I should have done this so many years ago, but I just kept putting it off. They have caused me quite a lot of annoyance and more than enough pain. The worst was when one of them got badly infected in India - man alive, that’s a situation I never want to be in again - and now they are finally gone. Huzzah!

Unfortunately I will have to endure another week or so of discomfort until my mouth is happy again and I stop looking like a greedy hamster, but at least I have drugs, ice cream and books galore.

In the meantime, here are some layouts from last year. I love this first one; it perfectly sums up our summer:

..and this one is somewhat bittersweet, about our oh so cute niece and nephew and how sad it is that we live so far away from them the rest of our family as well.

Alright, so I kept waiting for JK to be able to help me photograph this album, but the only days he came home early enough we were too busy - so here’s a lovely mish-mash of porch photos and scans of the pages I’ve made so far. The album is an 8×8 corduroy album from American Crafts in the most desert-like color I could find. The page protectors are from We R Memory Keepers, but unfortunately they didn’t fit the album - I had to punch two extra holes in each protector. Lame.

I wanted the album to really focus on the photos, so I chose white and grey cardstock as my base, no patterned paper (there’s so much color in the photos already!) and minimal embellishments - just those cute butterflies from Quickutz, cut out in different sizes with my Silhouette. This page is from our first hike of the trip, to Cable Mountain in Zion National Park:

I’m using the same fonts throughout the album: Century Gothic for journaling, CK Becky for the “handwritten” titles and Modern No. 20 for the rest of the titles.

If you live in St. George (or anywhere in Utah for that matter), you must visit Snow Canyon State Park. We ended up there as a backup when our backpacking trip in Zion got rained out, and we were so happy it happened!

To go with the butterfly theme (ok, so it was just an excuse to finally use them…), I’m adding butterfly transparencies from Hambly between some of the pages. I love those things.

To make the pages easy to put together (since I have yet to actually finish an album…), I’m using a bunch of divided 4×6 page protectors, and a lot of the designs are based on 4×6 or 5×7 photos - the 8×8 size is perfect for this!

This is from Bryce Canyon National Park where we hiked an excellent little loop:

After Bryce we spent some time in Valley of Fire State Park in Nevada. Again, everyone should visit this place! Lots of little hikes and areas to explore, and the best campground you’ll ever find (free showers!).

We avoided Vegas (ugh, Vegas) like the plague and chose slot canyons over slot machines:

Valley of Fire was where we saw our favorite animals of the trip (antelope ground squirrels and chuckwallas!) and our absolute least favorite animal (rattlesnake, eep!!):

I attached the butterflies to the outside of some of the page protectors because it looked more interesting - let’s see how long it takes before they fall off.

…and here’s a mushy closing page (for the time being) with a collection of some of our self-portraits.

Happy vacation, happy album, happy me! The full trip report is on nwhikers.net.

I haven’t been scrapbooking much the last couple of months, and when I do dust off my neglected hobby, I feel like I am just doing the same thing over and over again. Hiking photos, blue and white papers (usually from the same big slab of paper I bought at Costco a couple of years ago because I am too lazy to look for anything else), Heidi Swapp transparent snowflakes (ditto) and a computer font for the title. It’s all about the laziness; my scrapbooking crap is in such a horrid state of disarray that it is impossible to find what I am looking for and, frankly, not very tempting to sit down and make a page. Basically I need to just suck it up and clean.

Ali Edwards used a digital template in the current issue of Creating Keepsakes that I just fell in love with, so I had to try it. I wanted to stuff more photos from our hike to Camp Muir in there, so I made a second page using the top of the template. Easy and fast, huzzah!

(Speaking of Ali, this post made me really want to get into scrapbooking again.)

I made this next layout for the February issue of CK - the photos are from our amazing trip to Jade Lake last summer. The paper is blue but at least I didn’t use those transparent snowflakes.