Today, in honor of Travel Scrapbooking Week, I've assembled a collection of some of my very favorite travel scrapbooking supplies. Not all of these items are travel-themed, per se. They're not even all actual scrapbooking supplies, but they're definitely things that I love and find useful for documenting my travels and adventures.

Let's dive in and see what we have here!

 

• Map papers. This one may seem obvious- I mean, travel = maps, right? Except that not all map papers come from travel lines. I've seen some gorgeous map prints in non-travel lines, such as this lovely piece from Pink Paislee's Daily Junque collection.
• Shipping tags. I used to buy these in packs of 100, but started using so many that it was just more economical to go for the 1,000 pack boxes. I use these large-ish ones, and these slightly smaller ones.
• Tim Holtz Map Stamp. Seriously, if you buy this one stamp and a few colors/types of ink, you can make just about any type of embellishment you need for your travel albums. Stamp it on shipping tags. Stamp it on envelopes. Stamp it on the cover of your mini album. Stamp it on the background of your layouts...you get the picture! It's amazingly detailed and stamps a really nice, clean image. A definite must-have.
• Anything air mail themed. One of my personal favorites is the Air Mail Divine Twine with a red, white, and blue color twist. You can also find air mail envelopes and other items at online sellers, especially on Etsy. Oh, Hello, Friend has a great post linking to lots of great air mail items.
• Speaking of Etsy, you can find lots of great travel journals and custom embellishments from places like Evalicious, and as a bonus they usually provide great inspiration images of the finished products, too.
• Mini albums. There are so many of these on the market! My current favorite is the Amy Tangerine Mini by American Crafts. You can also make your own with index dividers for covers, binder rings (I usually use 1.5" or 2" rings), and a Crop-A-Dile or similar sturdy hole punch.
• Papertrey Ink Label Basics stamp and die set. While not the greatest for scrapbooking on the go (since you'd also have to carry inks and a die cutting machine), these are wonderful for scrapbooking your travels when you have your regular craft supplies at your disposal. This set contains a variety of shapes and sizes of labels, all designed to look like the vintage styles that are oh-so-trendy right now (not to mention classic- they go with anything!). Purchase this one stamp set and both die sets that go with it, and you can make all the labels you'll ever need.
• Ledger papers. Ledger papers come in a variety of styles and colors- grids, lines, and forms are just a few of the varieties you'll find- and make great backgrounds that add interest while not taking the attention away from your photos. They also usually blend well with almost any other paper line, making them great fillers. Basic Grey's Basics line is my favorite example of ledger papers, though many other lines will include a sheet or two of this style in the mix.
• Travel themed scrapbook paper. We've reached the "well, duh" item on the list. :) It just makes sense to use travel themed supplies to scrapbook about travel, right? There are so many great options in this category, but two of my favorites are October Afternoon's Boarding Pass collection and Basic Grey's Wander line. 

I hope that you've all enjoyed Travel Scrapbooking Week! If you find yourself inspired to scrapbook your vacation photos old or new by something you've read here, please link up your creation so we can all see it!

Have a scrappy weekend!

travel scrapbooking week | aruba in a jar

May Flaum and I are teaming up this week to blog about our favorite travel scrapbooking ideas. Be sure to stop by her blog to see what she's got in store today! 

For this next installment of Travel Scrapbooking Week we'll be taking a look at ways to display your travel memories "off the page." Darren and I almost always come back from trips with items that just aren't scrapbookable- seashells, sand, bit of sponge and coral (yes, we are indeed avid beachcombers and snorkelers)- and for years I've tried to find a good way to display those things.

Enter the memory jar- a concept I've seen around the web in several places, including here on Martha Stewart's web site...

...and also here at Young House Love.

I love this idea since it's fairly inexpensive and requires only that you have a jar of some sort and stuff to put in it, and it keeps all those fun collected items out on display.

We definitely came back from our Aruba trip with "stuff," all of which was packed carefully into a shoebox (from the shoes I had to buy while we were there). I'm embarrassed to say that I let it all stay just like this for almost 9 months before I finally got around to putting it in a jar, but luckily for you it gave me a chance to take some photos of the process last night as we put the jar together!

Speaking of jars, I chose this apothecary-style beauty to be the home for our found treasures. Apothecary jars can be expensive when purchased from stores such as Williams Sonoma or Pottery Barn, but I scored this one at HomeGoods for around $15- not too bad! You can also do this project in regular canning jars, washed out jelly jars- whatever suits you! Pretty jars can also be found at Goodwill, thrift stores, and flea markets, so keep your eyes open for hidden treasures as you're out and about- you never know what you'll find!

We started the process of putting our jar together by sorting out the items we'd brought back with us.

We had several bags of sand from different beaches around the island- every place we went to had its color and texture mix.

Some of the larger items in the box included pieces of sponge, a bit of driftwood, and a several other ocean-y specimens.

And then, of course, there were the shells. I especially love all those lovely sea biscuits (though one didn't quite survive the trip back home- you can see his remains in the right hand side of the picture).

We started by layering three different types of sand in the jar, the finer grains on the bottom and the more interesting coral sand on top.

And then we carefully placed the larger items in, starting with the driftwood and working our way around it with the smaller items. We didn't put everything we brought back with us in the jar, just enough to give a representation of what we saw on the trip.

And the finished product? Is quite lovely if I do say so myself. It was a long wait, but we're totally thrilled with how this turned out and happy to have it together.

Don't limit your vacation memory keeping to just photos and scrapbooks- try using some of those found items to create home decor items that will keep those memories out on display to be enjoyed every time you see them.

I'll be back tomorrow with the final installment of travel scrapbooking week, where I'll share some of my favorite travel scrapbooking products!

travel scrapbooking week | aruba photo album

May Flaum and I are teaming up this week to blog about our favorite travel scrapbooking ideas. Be sure to stop by her blog to see what she's got in store today! 

I'm back again to share my Aruba photo book!

While I understand that looking at hundreds of a stranger's vacation photos is probably not most people's idea of a good time, I think that this album will give you an idea of how you can use digital templates to corral and display massive numbers of photographs fairly easily. The actual assembly of this 61 page book (not including the organization) took place in a single weekend while I was also doing laundry, cleaning, cooking, and even a bit of traditional scrapbooking.

The key to that speed was the organization that I mentioned earlier. I had already edited all of my photos and blogged the journaling, so I didn't feel the need to add any writing to the photo book itself- it's purely for displaying the images. If you want to read more about how I typically organize a large vacation album project, you can read here about how I went about organizing a traditional scrapbook album for a cruise. The process of organization is somewhat the same for a digital book- all the photos are edited at once and organized into groups, though the resizing and printing steps aren't necessary in the case of a digital photo book. Then it's just a matter of assembling pages and organizing them into a book.

For this particular album I used a combination of Ali Edwards 2010 Week in the Life Templates and the Curated Layered Templates by Paislee Press. I included a mix of photo collages and single photo pages, dressing up the beginning and ending pages for each section (in this case each day) with papers from Cosmo Cricket's Salt Air collection. I've linked up each section's coordinating blog post mostly for my own reference (one day I may print QR codes that link to the individual blog posts to add to the inside of the album's back cover).

And now, on with the album!

January 30 + 31

travel scrapbooking week | what do you do with all those photos?

May Flaum and I are teaming up this week to blog about our favorite travel scrapbooking ideas. Be sure to stop by her blog to see what she's got in store today! 

In yesterday's Travel Scrapbooking Week installment I talked a whole lot about scrapbooking while on a trip, but not so much about what happens with allllll those photos and allllll that stuff that got collected after you get back home. Let's face it- travel journals are great for capturing things in the moment or for getting the highlights of a trip scrapbooked quickly, but once you get home you probably have hundreds (or for long trips maybe even thousands) of photos that you're going to be itching to do something with. Today we'll talk about some of the many forms that something can take and some concrete steps you can take to prep for any one of them.

Step 1: Asses the Situation

First thing's first- you've got to corral those photos! Go ahead and block out some time to sit down and at least transfer your photos off of your digital camera (or off of the media cards if you used more than one) and place them all on your computer. Don't worry about sorting, culling or editing right now, just get an idea of how many pictures you're dealing with for this particular project. (At this point I should probably stop and preach to you about backups, but I'll suffice it to say that you really should be backing up your photos and leave it at that.)

This is also the perfect time to gather up any "stuff" that you collected on the trip- tickets, brochures, menus, foreign currency, etc.- that you want to include in your album. Again, don't worry about sorting any of this stuff, just get it together into a pile or container of some sort so you'll have an idea of the volume.

Step 2: Divide and Conquer

Now this is the step that will probably take the most time, aside from the actual scrapbooking, of any of the project phases I'll be talking about. This is where you go through your photos and sort them into categories. For a long trip you may choose to go with a chronological order and bin your photos by day (this is what I most commonly do), or you may choose to sort into other categories- for instance one category of photos for museums you visited, one for food photos, and so on. The possibilities here are endless, but it's really important that you choose something to go by since that something will form the framework for the rest of your project.

As you're sorting your photos, be sure to sort your memorabilia, too.

Step 3: Thin the Herd

If Step 2 is the most time intensive, then Step 3 is where the most mental/emotional exertion comes into play. This step is where you plow through all those photos and all that stuff and choose exactly which pieces you want to use. Notice I said use and not scrap, because we're not even going to make that decision right now. And these photos aren't necessarily the ones you're going to print, either- you're just getting down to the really good ones and weeding out the extras (and weeding out doesn't necessarily mean delete- I never delete photos, though I know that everyone has a different take on that). Think of this step as simply choosing any and every photo that you would want to put into a regular photo album if you weren't a scrapbooker.

This is also the step where, if you choose to, you can edit your photos.

Step 4: Box it Up

Now we're down to the fun part- assembling a "kit" of sorts to scrap from. This kit can take on so many forms, like perhaps an actual album such as the fantastic Disney book that May Flaum has been showing us this week, filled with divided page protectors of photos right next to layouts. Or maybe you just want to print your photos and put them all in a box or drawer to have at your fingertips when the urge to make a layout strikes. This is a favorite trick of Shimelle Laine's- she printed mounds of photos from an around the world trip, then placed the 4x6 prints in a drawer to be scrapped into layouts as she has the time and inspiration to do so. If you want to print your photos for a traditional album that's all layouts (using photos that may or may not be 4x6), I have a super long, detailed post here about organizing, resizing, and cropping photos for an entire album from start to finish.

Maybe you're not ready to print your photos yet, and a digital route is a better answer for you right now. In this case, it might be worthwhile for you to put all those photos onto a USB drive for use in a digital photo frame, on a photo slideshow capable television, or in a Flickr album. My personal favorite thing to do at this point is to blog all of my chosen photos, complete with little snippets of information or stories about them right along side the pictures in the post, as I did with my Aruba vacation photos from earlier this year.

If you're a digital scrapper or will be going the digital route (perhaps with a photobook) with this particular batch of pictures, then you'll want to either export (if you use software such as Lightroom) or copy the photos to a working folder for use in your project later. (And I'll be back later today with lots more on the photobook subject!)

If you're having trouble deciding on a format for your project, May Flaum put up a fantastic post yesterday with some questions you can ask yourself that will help you decide. 

Step 5: Scrap It (Traditional)

Note to digi scrappers/photobook makers- this section is strictly about traditional scrapbooks, but I'll be back later today with a special post on digital just for you!

In reality there's some blending between Step 4 and Step 5, especially if you go ahead and blog your photos ahead of time- you've done your journaling then- or if you go ahead and crop, resize, and print your photos for specific layouts. You've also along the way probably decided on a format for your album. My favorite type of traditional travel album of late involves divided page protectors, so I'm going to walk you through one of mine that's in progress at the moment.

My album was totally inspired by May's divided page protector masterpiece, but my motivation for doing it this way was completely different from hers. May wanted all of her photos to be immediately out and available for her family to flip through, so she put all of her photos into page protectors right away. I've already blogged all of my Aruba photos, so my husband and I can flip through them on my web site any time we choose. Instead, my Aruba album is more of a purely crafty pursuit- something I can pick up and work on a little bit at a time here and there as I feel like it with no pressure to get it done by any certain date- I didn't even stress over trying to finish it for this blog post! :)

As I mentioned, I decided to go with divided page protectors for this album. I had all my photos printed at 4x6 (Snapfish had an awesome sale when I ordered them), and they're organized in boxes, in order, just waiting to be added to the album.

I'm allowing the album itself to come together slowly. All the supplies are kept together in a single project box, so if I get invited to a last minute crop and need a project, all I have to do is grab the photos, album, and project box (plus a few tools) and head out the door!

The pages are a huge mixture of configurations and sizes- everything from straight 4x6 photo pages to massive 12x12 single-page photos. I'm also taking an iterative approach to things- on my first pass through the album I'm concentrating just on placing things. On my second pass I'll do things like add embellishments and make things like those two receipts shoved into a page protector slot look a little more polished.

I'm also inserting any layouts I happen to make using photos from this trip right into the album. The whole thing is ordered chronologically, so when I finish a layout (or have a big photo printed), I just stick it in the appropriate spot.

I'm also not too concerned with having every layout be made with the same supplies. I do have a set of supplies that I'm using for all the divided page protector pages, but there's definitely room to mix it up a lot in here.

Oh, and all that stuff that got collected on the trip? I sorted it by day, as well, and have a page protector full of ephemera at the beginning of each section (each section represents a day of the trip). This stuff will get pulled out of this temporary storage space and placed into pages alongside photos as this album continues to take shape.

As part of my "kit" for this album, I pulled together an assortment of empty divided page protectors and placed them in the back of the album. This slide sorter page will be perfect for holding coins and little items that we picked up along the way- I'll simply stitch the top of it closed to keep them from falling out.

I love We R Memory Keepers divided page protectors because they come in so many configurations. Amazon carries a few of them, along with some American Crafts varieties.

Becky Higgins' Project Life page protectors are also wonderful to use for this type of project...

...in fact, I've been known to simply scrap a layout in one of them from time to time!

If you want to see more examples of scrapping albums using divided page protectors (I've already linked up May's fabulous one above), then you might want to check out examples here and here by Laura Vegas, and also here on the latest installment of Shimelle Laine's 4x6 Photo Love class.

And if you're a digital scrapper, or just want to check out the whole photo book thing, be sure to check back later today for a post with some tips on that!

travel scrapbooking week | dc mini album

May Flaum and I are teaming up this week to blog about our favorite travel scrapbooking ideas. Be sure to stop by her blog to see what she's got in store today! 

I'm back to share the results of my scrapbooking on the go experiment! If you missed the discussion about how I prepped for this album made while on a trip to Washington, D.C., you might want to check out this post from earlier today.

Before I launch into the actual completed album, I want to share some of my thoughts and results based on my prep and assembly of the album.

• The date stamp/ink pad turned out to be largely unnecessary since many of the tickets and receipts I added to the album already had the date on them somewhere, so I could have just left those two things at home. Next time I probably will.
• Having a pre-made album was both a blessing and a curse. It was great to have a foundation already put together, but my perfectionist self wanted to make everything fit into the number of pages I'd brought with me, so I probably ended up stretching it a bit more than I might have otherwise. Next time I may try binder rings to make it easy to add/remove pages.
• I wasn't sure when I packed the Sassafras letter stickers if I would use them or not, but I totally did, so something like that is definitely coming along next time.
• Thoughts on the mini printer- I could take it or leave it. I did end up printing photos while I was on the trip and scrapping about half of the album one morning as Huong and I sat in the dining room looking through photos on the laptop. I think, though, that if I'd been on any other trip I wouldn't have used it, so it may stay home next time. Instead, I'll probably cut some 2x3 and 2x2 (the most common size of photo I used in the book) placeholder papers to use in my album as I build it on the trip and note what photo should go in which spot so I can print and assemble that part when I get home. That'll also remove a couple of pounds and some bulk from my backpack.
• I found time to sort through and edit photos while in the strangest places- sitting in the passenger seat of a car in traffic, for example- and got it done in the time that I wasn't sightseeing or hanging out with family.

On the whole, I'm completely thrilled that this album is finished already! I usually don't have trips scrapbooked so soon (though I'm sure I'll still do some traditional layouts with the photos I took), and I have the piles of photos and ephemera still laying around my scrap room from vacations past to prove it (more on those later this week).

And, now, here's a look at the finished product!

Be sure to come back tomorrow, when I'll take a look at some ways to deal with the mounds and mounds of photos that are shot but not scrapbooked while on a trip. Hint: It's going to be a three post day!

travel scrapbooking week | mini on the go prep

May Flaum and I are teaming up this week to blog about our favorite travel scrapbooking ideas. Be sure to stop by her blog to see what she's got in store today!

A couple of weeks ago Darren and I took a weekend trip to DC to visit family, and I decided that it was the perfect opportunity to experiment with scrapbooking on the go. I've tried this type of album several times before but have never been very successful at it, so I really wanted to see if I could find a system that made it work for me.

I started off by making a small album to take on the trip. I love Amy Tan's travel mini albums, and I learned how to make a mini similar to the one in her American Crafts product line while taking her very first online class (now available at Big Picture Classes).

I packed a minimal selection of tools and supplies to use on the trip. I like to travel light, and whenever possible I try to fly carry-on only. In this case I was taking only a backpack for the weekend, so the small pile pictured below is what made the cut.

My journaling supplies included a selection of shipping tags, a few of my favorite journaling cards from the Project Life collection, brown and black pens, and my trusty library date stamp along with Tsukineko's Staz-On ink in Jet Black.

The tools were even more minimal- my Tim Holtz Tiny Attacher (yes, it was carry-on friendly!) and a tape runner. I didn't pack scissors since we were staying with family and I knew I could borrow a pair while there (and airport security would have thrown a fit about them anyway).

As for the actual scrapbooking supplies, I turned to the Amy Tangerine line from American Crafts for its die cuts and sticker book, then added some baker's twine, a couple of rolls of Hambly's awesome washi tape, and my most favorite ever woodgrain mini alpha stickers from Sassafras (I'm so incredibly sad that they're no longer making products).

Oh, and I added a couple more tiny things just in case I felt like getting artsy while on travel. Most color mist bottles are a full ounce and a bit bulky to carry in my allotted quart-size bag of liquids allowed by the TSA, but I really wanted to take along some inks to play with. The solution? Sparklers and Fireworks from Tsukineko! The Sparklers are a quarter of an ounce each and in the perfectly shaped package to slip into the extra space in that plastic baggie.

Fireworks are half an ounce per bottle and have the added benefit of drying super quickly, so no waiting time! They're also small enough to fit inside the allowed bag of liquids if you have a little extra room.

As another part of the experiment, I also packed my 4x6 HP Photosmart 330 printer. Yes, that's right, I took a printer. I know that a lot of mini albums made on travel are either put together with Instax photo or photos are added after returning from the trip, but I wanted to see how it would go with having the printer with me while away from home. Plus, it's super light and packed easily into my backpack, so it wasn't a big deal to carry.

So, how did the experiment go? You'll have to come back later today to find out when I share the results (and the completed album!), but for now I'll leave you with some photos of the mini album as it looked before I left for the trip. The papers are mostly from the Amy Tangerine line, with a sheet or two of Basic Grey Basics and October Afternoon's Seaside thrown in for good measure.

American Crafts Amy Tangerine Mini Book	American Crafts Amy Tangerine GOOD TIMES Sticker Book	Tsukineko Sparklers	100 Journaling Cards - 3" x 4" with Grid Design
Avery Manila "G" Shipping Tags, Unstrung, 4.75 x 2.375-Inches, Pack of 1000	Avery Shipping Tags, 2.75 x 1.375 inches, Manila, Pack of 1000	American Crafts Amy Tangerine Collection	2000 Plus Four-Band Date Stamp
Tsukineko JET BLACK STAZON Ink Pad Permanent	Tim Holtz Idea-ology TINY ATTACHER Stapler

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