Last November I went to Latvia and because I’m using it for the Explore My World section of my Silver Voyage Award I made a little scrapbook of it which I showed you late last year. I enjoyed it so much that I thought I’d go back to September and make one for my trip to Iceland, since I’d gone to the effort of saving every scrap of paper I touched while I was there. It took much longer than the Latvian one and it’s come out much fatter.
Let’s run over how I do these. I hole-punch all my scraps and put them in binder rings. I print out the diary I wrote while I was away, stick it on 6×6 scrapbook paper and hole-punch it. I print out photos. Some of these I stick on 6×6 paper before hole-punching, some I just plain punch. It’s easy, it’s non-technical, it requires zero artistic abilities. And yet it takes me forever!
And so I present it to you (not every page. That would very quickly get very boring):
So, this is the outside. The cover is just a piece of pretty starry blue paper I found and the other half of it is actually on the back. The inside is very neutral, with occasional gold decorations, hence the lettering and the strip of tape. Incidentally, that is the unstickiest washi tape on the entire planet, which is why it’s peeling away and why half the decoration on the inside is only half stuck down. Those are two-inch binder rings and attached is a little tag to tell me which scrapbook it is – when there’s a whole shelf of them, it’s not going to be so obvious which book is which.
This is the inside. Every day gets a divider like this, neutral colours, gold letters.
Here we have my luggage label, my hand luggage label and the first page of the blog/diary/digital postcard that I was still writing at the time – my phone burned out Monday morning and although it survived (that time!), it refused to charge until I got home. I printed it onto acetate sheets and stuck it in with glue dots.
Full-page photo of my guesthouse that first weekend (with my room labelled in gold pen) plus another blog page. You might be getting the idea of how this scrapbook works by now.
Another blog page and a mini photo of my favourite Icelandic snacks, with a strip of annoying tape for decoration.
Instax picture of me in the Blue Lagoon (taken with camera in waterproof case and then printed with Instax printer – it wasn’t a genuine instant photo, not there and then). Two photos stuck back-to-back, hole-punched and acting as a page. And then more blog.
On Sunday I took the bus up to the local pool. The tickets are too small to be hole-punched individually so I stuck them together with the gold tape and put them in as a pair.
This is the legal form/agreement from renting my campervan. They gave me a discount card for Olis garages and that’s stuck to a piece of scrap acetate from printing the blogs Underneath is a full-page photo of my van.
Blog plus a map cut down to 6×6. Oh, by now the blog’s turned into a paper diary because now I don’t have a functioning phone to write a digital blog on.
Instax photo (genuinely taken there and then with Instax camera), the only piece of part-page blog I’ve ever done so far, double-sided photo as page and photo on neutral paper background with a piece of untrimmed tape as decoration (it’s hard to trim. The knife just tears it and my mini scissors just don’t cut. I’ll sort it later).
Some more scraps. My overnight camping pass was a sticker, which I opted not to stick so that it could later go in whatever scrapbook I might make – it met its destiny. Parking ticket for Þingvellir hole-punched. Two Instax photos.
What have we got here? The pool at Borgarnes and the campsite at Hverinn cut out of the West Iceland tourism booklet, a double-photo as a page and some more blog.
I think this photo is actually stuck down. Then we’ve got a map of west Iceland cut out of the booklet again and a little blurb about Reykholt, where I stopped for lunch.
A full page from the booklet, a double-sided photo and a blog.
This dog lives at (well, next door to) Deildartunguhver. He’s pretty affectionate but he’s also a little matted and has nearly got himself “rescued” by well-meaning tourists at least once. Then there’s a petrol receipt and a double-sided photo almost hiding another lettered day divider.
Photo on neutral page, page from the booklet used as an actual page here and a full-page photo of the Giant of Arnarstapi.
Two full-page photos!
Full-page photo of the Berserkerhraun and Instaxes from throughout the day.
This is where the neutral theme gets abandoned for a moment – because the Northern Lights are special. So one full-page photo, my camping permission receipt and a smaller photo on a black background with green glitter accents left over from my first ever serious scrapbook page two years ago.
I’m about to hand back my van. So here’s the inside of it, my Ikea receipt from buying my USB adaptors, a double-sided photo (landscape this time) and a hint of blog underneath.
This is the end, close enough. Nice big picture of the Sun Voyager and the Sunday divider. I won’t bother showing you Sunday; I spent the day dragging a very heavy bag across Reykjavik, sat under a statue on a hill waiting for a bus for nearly two hours and then went to the airport.