Memory keeping on the move 2–daily journal

I enjoy travelling and exploring new places and I’ve had plenty of opportunities to visit some interesting places for work and on holiday. Since I started scrapbooking in 2006 I have used several different methods to create special holiday albums and to scrap while travelling. I thought others might be interested in what I have done and what worked for me. So each week I’m going to showcase one of the projects that I have used to record my travels.

Memory keeping on the move 2 - a daily journal on the move


In 2009 I spent several months travelling, mostly to islands in the Pacific – the pages I’m sharing are from when I was in Tonga. I wanted to record what I was doing and my impressions as they occurred and I did not want to face the task of putting together a big album at the end of the travels.

I used a Stacy Julian mini-album as my inspiration to have a photo page protector and sheet of card for each day. Finding a source of page protectors with 2 photo slots took some searching – I found these in paperchase. I cut down A4 card for the pages and added some tags and ribbon to them one afternoon so they were all done before I went.

I took the card and the D ring album with me on my travels. I took the album as it was the easiest way to keep the card from getting bent and the completed pages in order. My only other kit was three coloured pens to write with.

I wrote bits on the card during the day – sometimes I recorded what I had eaten or listed what I had seen. Sometimes I described the scene or how I was feeling or noted a conversation.


Each evening I downloaded the photos from the day and decided what to put into the album. I had my laptop with me (it’s actually notebook size) so this was easy. I often created a collage – using Picasa. I saved them all with the date as the name to help me identify the right ones when I finally had them printed and was putting them in the album.


This process worked really well for me when travelling around for over a month. It combined a daily record and photos in a format that I had created. The casual, not rules approach that I took to what I wrote was great for jotting things down throughout the day. I will definitely use this set-up again. It would work well for a shorter trip too and I can imagine an album made up of several short city trips.



If you missed the 1^st part of this series check back to the post about capturing everyone’s visual memory

Next week capturing moments and impressions with tags