So I've been home for about two weeks now, and the other day I was feeling especially restless so I decided to do some scrapbooking to keep myself occupied. It's not really scrapbooking, to be exact. It's more straightforward and takes much less artistic skill. Basically you just throw everything you collected throughout your trip into a file and ta-da~ it's done.
So these are some of the contents of my file for my recent trip to east Africa. It was quite a hassle lugging all these random "junk" along, like ticket stubs and all, seeing as we were backpacking and moving from place to place in our last month of travel, but I have always been such a hoarder and I don't regret it at all. Looking at every single item reminds me of something that happened on my journey (':
The most precious of these have got to be my children's drawings and letters. We did so many art classes with them in school and we had stacks and stacks of drawings lying around our village house. Towards the end when we had to leave I couldn't bring everything with me, so the best I could do was to sieve through and pick a few of my favourites to keep as mementos. As we prepared to say our farewells in the final weeks, the children also started writing letters to us, saying they loved us or giving us their (parents') phone numbers so we could call them. One girl wrote a letter requesting to come along with me, because she also has a love for adventure and it just melted my heart.
Materials needed:
- An A4 file, or whatever size you prefer
- Clear file pockets in varying sizes (e.g. A4, B5, etc.)
- Clear cardholders / postcard holders (these are also file pockets, but are specially for holding name cards, baseball cards, postcards, etc.)
- Paper clips (optional)
That's it. Then you set about slotting things into whichever pocket they can fit into. For example, ticket stubs, name cards, receipts etc. tend to go into baseball card or name card pockets. Some maps can fit into A4-sized file pockets, or I will fold them strategically to show my favourite place on the map before slotting it into an A4 file pocket. B5 file pockets tend to be really useful for small, odd-shaped things. Things that can't fit into any file pocket can be paper-clipped to the outside of a pocket.
On my recent trip to Japan, I found packs of these adhesive double-sided A4 photo pages (see above picture, left) at Daiso, the Japanese version of a dollar store. These fit perfectly into an A4 file and are really useful for displaying banknotes and photos. Previously I'd used clear postcard pockets for photos, which work as well, except that the orientation of the pockets tends to be portrait rather than landscape.
If you get plain files like that you can decorate the outside of it or label it, however you like. For the three plain coloured files I bought chipboard/felt alphabet stickers from craft shops and labelled them according to the year and country. My latest file for my trip to east Africa is the file with stripes, and for that I cut out an travel inspirational quote from a travel magazine and stuck it on the front.
Right now I have five files, starting from 2010, although not all my trips have been scrapfiled yet...I still have four trips to document!
