The much awaited early layouts of Chris Breecher

These first pages are from my sophomore year of college- March 1997. It is from an album that I put together for a class of mine. So there’s a bit of a story to the album. Darlene and John Flint were at a Weird Al concert. As part of the show he played “Biggest Ball of Twine in Minnesota,” and as legend would have it, as he was playing that song, Darlene and John looked at one another and said, “Spring Break.” Naturally, I wanted to join in this expedition. However, Cornell’s spring break (where Darlene and John went to school) was the week after Valpo’s. So how was I going to be able to miss a week of classes after just having two weeks off? Many of my classes graded attendance. So I decided to see if I could do a photography independent study on cheesy road trips. Luckily the photography professor was just odd enough to think that this was a good idea.


In the end John wasn’t able to go so it was Darlene, Steve and Darlene’s friend Mike that went to the trip. Anyway, here’s a spread from that album. As part of the trip I kept a journal. That’s my journaling on the left page. Steve had sent out an email during the trip and I included it on the left. I’ve also included a sugar packet and a match book that Steve decorated since the Happy Chef matchbooks were blank. And we started to call it “Happy Chey” since that’s what it looks like Steve wrote. (Please try to keep in mind that it was probably 4am and we had had very little sleep over the last three days.)

After the Road Trip album I made a similar styled one of my semester in England. I sent weekly emails to friends and family summing up my adventures from the past week and I printed these out and included them in the album amongst pictures, postcards, ticket stubs, brochures, etc.

And now we come to the layouts of 2000 and 2001. By this point I had decided that I disliked traditional photo albums with the pockets and the limitations of direction that photos could go, etc. I liked the 12x12 size because I could fit multiple pictures on a page. I saw the various scrapping stuff at AC Moore but I wasn’t exactly sure what to do with it. All of the pages I did were done on the insert papers inside the page protectors. And my adhesive of choice was a glue stick. I never really considered myselft to be "scrapbooking". This was just my form of a photo album.


First up is a layout from a trip to France. There are 5 pages in the album from the trip. To keep a theme throughout the France pictures I have a bit of that patterned paper on each page. My PP bits get smaller and smaller as the pages go on and I start running out of the sheet of paper.



Next is Plimoth Plantation. No patterned paper on this one, but a bit of cardstock. I’m not entirely certain what I was trying to do. However, I do explain my pictures a bit.



Apparently I then branched out into stickers. They seem to have thrown up on this page a bit.


And finally, the sin of decorative scissors. Not entirely certain what I was thinking here.