photo albums...

on my husband's side of the family, we used to draw names from a hat for the yearly gift exchange, but it was a bit much. for one thing we all have children, and many of us don't need anything (& have much more than we can use to begin with!)


we emailed back & forth one year, debating what to do...what we discovered was that we each longed for more time together as a family, but as i said...we all have children & are pretty spread out across the country. but an idea was born, along those same lines, that has stood the test of time. "the kinney family photo album exchange" is now in its 3rd year.

how it works:

we each put together a set of 4-6 album pages, with little notations/captions here & there, of our family throughout the past year. (for our lot, it ends up being eight sets.)

i like to mix it up a bit each year, trying something new. this year, i am turning to the big box of magazines i keep in the basement, for the photo backdrops. the key is to find pages with a lot of color/pictures & less of the writing. luckily, american advertisements are more about using beautiful pictures to draw us in than the actual products themselves. so much in fact that sometimes we cannot tell what exactly it is they are advertising...am i right??