Today we’re looking at my Switzerland scrapbook. Scrapbooking is one of my favourite activities when I’m not travelling – in fact, it’s one of my favourite activites full stop.
I am currently (and hopefully temporarily) unemployed. That means my wings are clipped until I get a new job and a new income. But it’s not so bad. Somewhere between five and eight years ago, I bought a 12×12 scrapbook and only did one (bad) page. I’ve been looking at it half-guiltily ever since. Over the years I’ve been travelling, I’ve accumulated quite a few pictures which mostly just sit on a hard drive or on Facebook. So I’m dragging some of them out and making a scrapbook from them.
I spent the best part of year living in Switzerland when I was a student, which was amazing. However, for reasons best left unexplored, I lost my wifi connection partway through the year and so to keep myself busy in the evenings, having discovered that at almost all Swiss stations there are photo printing machines, I started a scrapbook of my travels. It’s one of my greatest treasures and it genuinely looks a lot better than the “proper” scrapbooking I’m trying to get into at the moment although I’m trying to tell myself that’s just because my new scrapbook is only five pages long so far and will look lovely when there’s more of it.
I was clearly armed with a pack of primary-coloured paper, a pack of metallic gel pens and some stencils and I remember very little about actually making this book. I stuck in a lot of tickets and sometimes I let them be the page title and sometimes I put an actual title. One of my life’s biggest regrets is in this scrapbook, however – the balloon sequins on the third page of the balloon festival, where I got sick of putting them on individually and just stuck a load of gluestick in the corner where it dried white, messy and ugly. Wish I hadn’t done that. I’ve also left out the page featuring the mugshots and full names of all my friends and several pages of work, when I remembered I was there as a student and not as a traveller.
As my room was very bare, I collected postcards with views and stuck them up in a huge mural on my wall. At the end of the year, when it all had to come down, I put them in photo pockets in the back of my Switzerland scrapbook, with the consequence that it no longer quite closes properly.
Without further ado, please meet my Switzerland scrapbook.
