Travel Scrapbooking

So, you've got a huge trip coming up and you're beyond excited about it. But how are you supposed to document the trip thoroughly and keep up with your regular Project Life® or scrapbook? Lauren Hooper, teacher of On-the-Go Mini, is here to share an awesome suggestion! 

Scrapbooking is a passion of mine as well as a way of life – or at least a way of documenting it. Travel is my literal way of life – big, multi-country, multi-month travel – and documenting it can get tricky. In my class, On-the-Go Mini, I share how I recorded a week-long trip using a pre-made album and planning out my photos. However, I have to get even more creative to document my really, really big trips. So I chose to document this summer's trip around the globe with a photo-a-day project.

The day school was out this summer, my husband and I packed our backpacks and hopped on a plane headed for Russia. We planned to use the two months of summer break to circumvent the globe, eventually making our way back home to South Korea before school started again. We would travel by plane, train, car and boat and would spend time in six countries. There would be a ton to document, so I packed my DSLR, my Polaroid camera, a journal and a pen.

I knew I would need a definitive plan for documenting the breadth of this trip. A ginormous scrapbook was obviously in order, but I also wanted to keep up with my Project Life® album for the year. I knew the trip would offer too many choices to document in my small, everyday album, but I feared being overwhelmed by keeping up with that album plus a larger one. So the photo-a-day idea was born.

The premise was simple – I would take one photo each day that encapsulated that day. It could be anything from our view from the peak of the mountain we climbed to the friend we met up with to my favorite place or food. One photo representing each day + a date stamp, straight into my album. No questions asked. The millions of other photos would be scrutinized over and lovingly scrapbooked later. Simplicity was my goal – to be totally caught up in my Project Life® album the day we walked back in our door, and to have the big picture documented.

I love Polaroid prints and really wanted to put my Polaroid camera to good use, so that’s the avenue I chose. However, you could very easily (perhaps more easily) do this with just your phone camera. I had to choose when to pull out my Polaroid camera, which was a great exercise in being mindful of the best parts of each day, but you could simply create a trip album right in your phone’s photo app, or use the Collect App. If you go that route, take a minute each night to choose the day’s best photo and save it in your trip album. As soon as you get home, print them all out, slip them into your page protectors, and be done!

This project can be taken in so many fun directions. You could make a photo-a-day album of portraits, or #FromWhereIStand shots, or your meals, or street signs, or anything! The sky is the limit when choosing a subject! I’m a big fan of this idea, and it’s discussed in my On-the-Go Mini class. As with that class and this project, my goal is always to make memory keeping simple and fun – to have completed albums without all the stress. I really hope you will join me in my class and in documenting a trip with a photo-a-day project.

P.S. As you can see, I still added a few pieces of fun memorabilia alongside some of my photos, like the confetti from a party we attended and the bottle top from a drink I had on a certain day. Make sure you follow my blog, because there will certainly be a giant photo album to come!

P.P.S. My title card is a freebie from Big City Quiet Designs.

-Lauren


If you love Lauren's ideas as much as I do, check out more of her travel scrapbooking in her On-the-Go Mini class, and enjoy some major eye candy by Lauren and Caylee Grey in Art Journaling 101!

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