Paris travel journal preparation

I love planning for trips.

I enjoy doing all the research and finding little places to visit that are tucked away behind the main tourist attractions. Not that I don't like tourist attractions - seeing the sights is ace, but if there is a little stationery shop around the corner, I don't want to miss it in the rush!

One of my favourite parts though is putting a travel album together. I usually take a few bits and pieces with me, but I'll admit that I rarely have time to make the pages whilst I'm actually away. Recently I've been trying to do a bit of writing each day, it's surprising what you forget once you've been out all the next day.

I don't use a set book for my journals either - in fact I've done lots of different shapes and styles, my Japan album was 5x7 and bound with book rings, the Germany one was a little notebook, Italy was 12x6!

This time I've gone for 6x4. I'm thinking kraft with red/blue/yellow/green as accents. Since I'm only going away for a weekend I don't need loads of pages so I'm not picking many papers. I'm hoping the kraft cards below (DIY shop by American Crafts) will work as base pages.

Here are few if the things I've picked out ready to go:

Making a tiny 'project life' style album

I have seen a lot about the Project Life scrapbooking system and wanted to try the idea out for myself without investing in a lot of expensive stuff. So I made this smaller version.

I used this folder which is available from Paperchase. It's the same one I used for my December Daily which you can see here. You can also get a range of pages and some plastic pockets from Paperchase too. They have a full page pocket and one for two 6x4 photos. It's a three ring binder, which we don't use a lot here, but I just use a single hole punch to get the holes in the right places where I used paper pages.

I enjoyed having a go at this so I think I will go ahead and pre-order one of the new editions which are coming out this year.

Make your own totally* free rubber stamps

*Okay, not totally free but almost.

I had this idea the other day, it's probably been done before (for the net is vast and infinite) but I was hit by a flash of inspiration and had to try it out. Graphic patterns like chevrons are really in at the moment in various crafts and certain kinds of design. I wanted to be able to use them in paper crafts without a) printing them out or b) forking out a lot of cash. See, I like rubber stamps, but they can be pretty pricey and sometimes I don't want to use the same shapes again.

Basically, I made simple stamps from rubber bands. I cut up some Amazon packaging and taped it together to make a sturdy base then used some strong double-sided tape to stick bits of rubber in place. Now I did say almost free. Obviously we paid for the stuff that was delivered in that cardboard, but corrugated card is easy to pick up at the supermarket. Free. The elastic bands? The postman regularly leaves them on our porch when delivering said merchandise. Free. The tape though, I did pay for.

These are just pages from my sketch book (and I only have black ink) but I think they work quite well. For free. The flags are my favourites. I could have cut all the little pennants out of paper, but this was fast and has a nice hand made feel. Maybe that's why I didn't want to just print them out? I do that kind of work all day, when I get home it's nice to play with more tactile art forms.

Obviously these are not sturdy pieces of kit. Yes, some areas are still sticky where the tape is not covered. Yes, that meant they stuck to the sleeve of my jumper whilst I was reaching for the cmd button just now. But, who cares? I enjoyed making them and it's a super fun way to recycle.