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.
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 thing ever.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Sometimes there’s something as simple as a scrap of spare card cut at an angle to make a pocket.
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.
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.
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.
And that is how you fit 273 photos into a 42-page scrapbook.