Wedding Album Wonders

This past Sunday marked one year since The Husband and I were married.  A lot can happen in one year and for us a lot did.  The Husband got a new job resulting in our move across the country, I stopped working, we both went about the daunting process of finding a new church, a new group of friends, learning how to get around, all while working hard on our still new relationship.  At times it's been rough, but other times it's been fantastic and those are the ones that I strive to remember the most.  Now, as we close on our first year of marriage it feels that we have a bit of a routine, we're learning more and more about how we think and react, things seem to fall into place more frequently without needing a shove from us.  The year ahead fills us with hope and joy to see how God will continue to work in us and through us.  It was with my brain reeling with these thoughts that I knew it was time to finally sit down and work on our wedding album.

I have always loved being able to go back and look at my parent's wedding album and knew that I wanted to put together something similar for ours.  I've done the full on scrapbooking in the past and really don't have a desire to do that again but I still wanted something purposeful, something that could last through the generations without feeling outdated.  That's when I found out about a different way of doing scrapbooks here.  The idea is that you combine your pictures with scrapbook paper in the same sizes, this results in a layout with space to write thoughts or titles without the necessity for stickers, stamps, or hours put into each page.  Rather than buying a kit to do this I purchased a beautiful leather album for 40% off at at Joann's, used scrapbook paper I already had on hand, and prepaid for 250 prints through Snapfish giving me the freedom to pick almost as many pictures as I wanted with minimal cost to myself.  

Please excuse the poorly taken iphone pictures but instead check out Rebekah Hoyt Photography for the fabulously vivid originals!  Let's take a look at the process and a few of the spreads shall we?

All of my materials

The various pieces of scrapbook paper I cut to size

 

Less than 4 hours after I started cutting my scrapbook paper to size and the whole album was finished.  I'm sold!  

Tips & Tricks:

• My general rule of thumb for what to write out and what not to was that if there was a detail that I would never want to forget no matter how many generations this lasts through (i.e. groomsmen and bridesmaids names, titles and artists used for the important dances, etc.) it got written down.  
• I am still deciding whether I want to use the space next to all the dancing pictures to write the names of the people in the pictures or if that will make it look too busy, so for now it's completed as is.  
• When selecting pictures I did pay some attention to how many vertical and horizontal pictures would exist on a page.  
• Once I had selected all of the images that I wanted specifically in spreads or seemed to work well together, I was still left with a fair number of pictures.  Rather than putting them in a separate album I opted to make the page with the getaway car the official end, as marked by the solid page of scrapbook paper, and then to place the remaining pictures after that point so that they are all in one place.  
• What I like about this arrangement is that you can look through the first two thirds of the album and see the complete story unfold and then, tucked away in the back, like a perfect epilogue, are all the extras, even more people, joy, and happiness to gaze upon and remember fondly.

I hope you have enjoyed a little saunter through our wedding and have maybe been inspired to try a new way of keeping photos on hand to be able to flip through and look at whenever you want to!

Thanks for reading and happy crafting!