The Big Album - Europe 2019 — A Pocketful of Licorice

Aug 17

Aug 17 The Big Album - Europe 2019

Today, I wanted to share the big album I put together to document my April trip to The Alps, Cinque Terre, Provence, and Barcelona. This is the seventh April vacation trip I’ve chaperoned with my school. This year we took 80 students (2 buses), and they were the best group. Traveling with 80 to 130 (oh yes, some years it’s 3 buses) high school students may not be everyone’s cup of tea. It’s definitely exhausting, but I love it.

I’ve already shared the traveler’s notebook I put together to quickly document some of my Europe 2019 memories. Mainly that was to tide me over. Because I was so excited when I got home that I couldn’t wait until summer vacation. School vacations are the only times I can really tackle a big travel album. I suppose I could work on it in chunks throughout the school year, but that’s not really how I operate. I like to binge, generally. On TV shows or podcasts or books. Or on crafting. If I start it, I want to finish it.

This time around, my approach was different in several ways, instigated by the fact that this year I delegated the task of printing the photos. Editing and printing and trimming the photos is pretty much the only part of scrapbooking that I don’t like, and I took over 1700 photos on this trip and I just didn’t want to deal with it. I ended up ordering my photos from Persnickety Prints. I’m so happy with this decision. I’m not sure why I’ve never done this before. However, since this was my first time ordering prints for a large project, I was a bit unreasonable about how many photos to order. Sure I could have counted the photos I’d used in other travel albums, but I didn’t. I just ordered 400 photos like a dummy. This glut of photos resulted in an album that’s really photo heavy. Way more than usual. Initially, I narrowed it down to 180 or so photos, but a combination of me not really liking how the filler cards were looking and me wanting to use even more of the photos I’d ordered led to an album with almost no filler cards. Just photos and journaling cards. There are over 200 photos in this album.

In the past, I’ve built my travel albums page by page, but this time around, with soooo many photos, I ended up placing all the photos in the pocket pages first, to make sure I could fit them all in the album. Then I went back and filled in the journaling cards and embellishments.

And usually, I spend a lot of time carefully selecting products from my stash to make a customized kit for my travel albums. But I’d just ordered a bunch of products from Ali Edwards’s new travel release, so I just decided to use those. Normally, I like making my own kit for a travel album, but I just wasn’t feeling it this time. All the products in Ali’s travel release are designed to work together, and I love the look of them, and I’d just gotten them in the mail, and I was excited to use them.

The album I used is a SN@P album from Simple Stories. Every Europe trip since 2012 is in one of these albums. I think they’re discontinued and they’re getting harder to find (and also I’m weird and don’t want to repeat a color). I have one more set aside for the 2020 trip, and after that I might look for a different album system for my travel albums.

The cards and embellishments are all from Ali Edwards Designs. I used stamps from Ali Edwards Designs, Kelly Purkey Shop, and Studio Calico throughout the album. The titles are all done using the Departure alpha from Kelly Purkey Shop, which is an old-fashioned airport departure board design - perfect for a travel album.