Stay At Home Storytelling: too many photos in a travel scrapbook

Posted on by Julie

While we’re all safe at home for the foreseeable future and with no new travel on the horizon for some time, it’s a good time to look back at our past travels and one of my favourite ways of doing that is by making scrapbooks.

Actually, I’ve discovered I have a surprising amount of scrapbook content hiding in this blog. The other day I showed you the Moscow pages of my Russia scrapbook – it’s been my Big Project during these strange and alarming times and at one point I feared it was so big that even now wasn’t enough time to finish it. But I have – give or take that every few days I open it up again and do something else to it.

I’m not going to show you the whole thing. It’s two volumes, it’s nearly four inches thick in total (admittedly, including four covers) and it’s just not that interesting to people who weren’t there. You know how big it is? Let me list what’s gone into it:

273 6×4 photos
89 journalling cards (two sizes of plain white index cards plus some spaces the size of those cards where I’ve written directly onto the scrapbook’s pages)
84 postcards
33 tickets and boarding passes
21 Instax mini pics
15 coins, commemorative medals and metro tokens
7 maps
5 bags
5 watercolour sketches
4 dry leaves
3 prayer slips
3 hand-made minibooks
3 pages of Excel spreadsheet of what I spent
2 miniature Faberge eggs
1 chunk of malachite
1 Hermitage pin badge
1 miniature spoon from Perm
1 metro smartcard
1 metro pay-ring
1 CD of my digitised film photos
An entire bag of receipts

When I started, I fondly believed that would fit in a single 10×10 40 sheet 1-inch thick spiral bound scrapbook (this one, in fact – non-affiliate link so don’t worry, I don’t get a penny). I still fondly believed it when I was nearly two-thirds of the way through, had torn the bindings out and replaced them with hinged rings and couldn’t close it because the non-hinged end was four inches thick. Yes, eventually I had to get a second book. In order to give both books a front and back inner cover it became 41 pages long and I made it an additional page out of thick glitter cardstock so all of that stuff I just listed fitted into 42 pages.

My Russia scrapbooks: two 10x10 albums, re-bound with hinged binder rings because they got too thick for the original spiral binding.

Some scrapbookers would says 273 photos plus all the rest is far too much for one scrapbook and you should dump a load of it. But I happen to want all those pictures and it’s my scrapbook and realistically, no one else is ever going to look at it, not properly.

So I’m going to show you some of the ways I fitted everything in.

First, I had already decided after going to Rome last May that I wanted a chain hung from the binding with small interesting bits hanging from it, so here are the miniature eggs, the malachite, the badge, the spoon and the pay-ring – like an Oyster card, I hold that against the turnstile to enter the Moscow metro and it’s my favourite thingĀ ever.

The souvenir/keyring chain attached to the outside of my Russia scrapbook. There are various small bits attached by miniature keyring rings.

I did a little watercolour sketch of St Basil’s and then rather than just stick it in, I built a concertina mechanism from red card so that it opens up a little bit which allows me to pop in two postcards and a journalling card with an Instax on the back of it.

A postcard pocket made from a watercolour sketch with a concertina mechanism

This page is not merely a page. It’s three pages. I built two new pages and stuck them together so they folded open and then stuck the arrangement down. It means this page has five sides and also provides a bit of extra colour.

A gold hinged page inside my Russia scrapbook. You'll see how it folds out in my next picture.

A gold hinged page inside my Russia scrapbook, now folded open to show the three separate surfaces. It's hinged at the scrapbook's open edge and makes two extra double-sided pages.

You’ll see this a lot, photos stuck down at one end so they fold open to reveal something else underneath and something else on the back. Sometimes it’s horizontal like this but I’ve used it vertically as well and in some cases – the page opposite, for example – when you unfold it in one direction, there’s something that folds down in the opposite direction too.

Hinged photos in my Russia scrapbook. There are two lines of three photos stuck overlapping each other.

The same photos from the previous picture but this time opened up to show the backs and the behind. In this case, there's journalling on the backs of them but because they're hinged you can see both sides of all of them.

Extended hinged photo. This one folds open sideways and then two pages of journalling fold down from the bottom of the opened photo.

A lot of photos are stuck back to back and then attached to the rings using paperclips to create extra mini-pages. That’s because I knew it was going to be re-bound but didn’t know how yet and I didn’t want to go quite as extreme as punching holes until I was sure. I’m now sure but I prefer to keep them in with the paperclips. It’s more textural.

Two photos stuck back-to-back and added with paperclips to the binder rings.

Concertinas. This is just a bigger version of this hinged photos from a couple of paragraphs up. Some of them have tabs at the top so I can hold them closed with velcro dots so they don’t escape and get damaged when I’m turning the pages.

A concertina of photos. You can't see the velcro tab at the top. It's really just another hinged photo but with eight photos stuck back to back folding open.

Two of my favourite contraptions here. I ended up with half a dozen spare pictures that I wanted in the book but didn’t have space for. I’d been collecting red and gold envelopes so it seemed a good idea to just pop them in an envelope stuck onto the page.

A gold envelope stuck down in the corner of my scrapbook, containing a handful of extra photos.

But we’re not done yet. Just this week, I discovered the art of perfect binding with PVA glue and now that little packet of loose photos is a slim little 4×6 minibook that lives in the envelope.

Close-up of a handmade perfect bound minibook. It's got a gold glitter cover and it strengthened with gold glitter duct tape.

Inside the handmade perfect bound minibook. It's handful of photos bound at the top spine with PVA glue.

As soon I was given this plastic bag for my postcards and badge from the Hermitage, I knew I wanted it to go in the scrapbook somehow. So I cut it down to about 10×10 and stuck it in around three sides with some postcards behind it and now it’s a bag that I can keep another postcard, my ticket, my information leaflet/museum plan and a journalling card inside.

The front of a plastic bag stuck in as a scrapbook page. There are bits and pieces of scrap inside/underneath it.

The contents of the plastic bag page on top of it. The leaflet is half in to show how it works.

This is the only time I did this. I had quite a few selfies taken in the wilds and the quiet of the parkland above Murmansk but it would take up so much room! So I had them printed as… well, it’s not a bookmark but it’s that shape.

Strip of selfies from Murmansk.

Sometimes there’s something as simple as a scrap of spare card cut at an angle to make a pocket.

Gold angled pocket taking up nearly half a page, containing a folded map, a spare photo and a journalling card.

Here’s my extra glitter page and as a bonus, it has one of those velcroed concertinas on it too and a journalling card hidden underneath.

Extra page made from glitter cardstock. It looks like all the other pages except it's a little thicker and it's glittery.

Another favourite. Another souvenir bag stuck into the book – this one’s smaller and I opted to cut the top off rather than the back – and inside it was a handful of photos of Red Square by night and as of Tuesday, there’s another little perfect bound minibook, this one containing a journalling card as well as the photos, which makes it look like a proper little notebook when you open it up, because that’s the first page.

Handmade perfect bound minibook poking out of a plastic bag stuck down on a page.

Journalling inside the handmade perfect bound minibook

And then there’s the back, which actually contains quite a lot. There’s another shopping bag, this one containing my Moscow map. I bought a pack of coin collecting album pages and cut a piece off to house a handful of small change (it’s also cut in assorted shapes throughout the book to house tokens). A paper bag that had postcards in it now contains all my receipts, clipped together by date with alternating red and yellow paperclips and labelled with date and description as if I was back at work, and then the spending record is a wonky gold-glitter concertina stuck into the back cover.

Moscow city map poking out of an opaque shopping bag with a Russian doll on it.

Layered stuff at the back of my scrapbook. On top is a grid of coin pockets containing some small change, behind is a tall brown paper bag and behind that is a gold concertina that contains my spending record.

Sample receipt from my Russia scrapbook. It's from the first day, it's all held together with a red paperclip and the top is labelled with the date and description in red pen.

Spending record half-unfolded. It's a long Excel spreadsheet backed with gold glitter card and stuck in the back of the book so it concertinas open.

And that is how you fit 273 photos into a 42-page scrapbook.