Back in 2002, I went on a school trip to Russia. I’ve written about part 1 (Moscow) here and part 2 (St Petersburg) here – but there’s more!
Earlier in the year, I rediscovered a stack of boxes under my bed, containing assorted precious things from my schooldays, mostly. If I’d stopped to think about it, of course I’d have known that there are packets of scrap from various things, including our DofE practice expedition, keepsakes from a few… well, we used to call them puppies, and stuff collected from school trips. Not only that, there’s a small collection of notebooks containing diaries from said trips.
There was an entire carrier bag full of things I’d kept from Russia. There was a diary of almost all the trip – full of gems such as how we were so bored during the classical music concert we were taken to that we counted the squares on the ceiling and walls and who fell asleep. I had a suspicion, proven correct, that I’d collected a few postcards and put them in a long-unopened postcard collection box. I knew I had an album full of actual print photos. And then there’s my Russia visa in my very first passport in a drawer downstairs.
In short, it seemed a shame not to combine all this into one big collection of Everything From Russia. I spent a few days dithering over how to do it. I’ve been making 6×6 mini scrapbooks of every trip for the last year, they started off pretty quick and easy and have been becoming increasingly complex and difficult – but 6×6 didn’t seem the right size for this. I sat and stared at my 12×12 album, possibly the heaviest object in the entire house, but that just seemed too big, and I didn’t like the idea of putting all these things inside page protectors. I have some smaller ringbound books – was that the answer? And then in the end, I picked up an 8×8 album I’ve had for about ten years and decided I’d put it all in there.
When I bought it, I did so because it’s so plain. My 12×12 is similarly plain – black paper cover with red strip down the left side – no pictures, no words, no decoration. I’m not entirely sure that plain cream really fits a trip to Russia but never mind. This album needed using and 8×8 is actually quite a pleasant size.
So, the first job was to get an idea of what it was going to look like and I took inspiration from a Red Square page layout I found on Pinterest. I quite liked the neutral grey look with the red and blue accents. That’s the theme I would go for. So off I went to Hobbycraft for red card, grey paper, a few red and blue letters and a set of page protectors, since 10 was never going to be enough. The Project Life ones don’t fit with the decade-old post positioning so job one when I got home was to re-punch all the pockets, lining them up with the originals. I’ve since ordered two more sets and I know I’m going to have to do it all over again.
So: front cover.
Since I was taking the book apart to put in the new pages, I also replaced the slightly battered, off-white end pages with new red ones. Nice simple front cover – the title isn’t as wobbly in real life as it looks in bright sunlight.
And then I got to work. I have to type up an entire diary, and I wrote a lot. As of today, I’ve written up the first two days – it’s the best part of 3000 words already. Then I had to figure out how to print it. I thought it was easy – I’d set my document to 8×8, cut my grey A4 paper down to 8×8 and print. But no. Oh, the printer doesn’t mind. It’s just that it doesn’t print. I put it through the printer and it came out absolutely ink-free three times in a row before I realised I was going to have to build text boxes and position them carefully within an A4 page. Within a few pages, I’d settled into a pattern of cutting the grey paper to 7.5 x 7.5 and centering it on the red card, which isn’t what I did on the first two or three pages, so I’m seriously considering re-doing them. But not yet.
The other problem I’ve got is that I don’t want to take photos out of my original album and stick them in here. But they’re film photos and I don’t think I have the negatives. I mean, they might be in the box, but all the other negatives are in a pocket in the back of one of my other albums. How do you reproduce film photos? Do I have to scan every single one? Can Boots do it? So for now, I’ve left gaps where I want the photos and although you probably can’t read it, there’s a very faint scribble of which photo is going to go in there.
My aim is to finish this for Christmas, chiefly because when The Old Gang meet at the pub every 23rd December, I want to take it along. We’re running out of old photos because we bring them every year and they’re losing their novelty value but this will be new and yet old and I want to show it off – but I need to finish it and I need to get those photos in. Worst case, I’ll stick them in temporarily with loops of masking tape on the back. But I still need to do a lot of typing and a lot of positioning.
Watch this space, and in the meantime, I’ve learnt that I quite like 8×8, even if it’s harder to get the papers that make the 6×6 books so quick and easy.