
My husband and I recently took a trip to California to visit my brother and drive up the coast, ending up in San Fransisco (a place I've always wanted to visit) for my 32nd birthday. I've tried blogging the trip and making online photo albums, but didn't have a place for the great ephemera that we collected, like this awesome pamphlet on the left called "Don't Die in the Desert," complete with two exclamation points and a skull to let you know that they mean business. I decided to forgo digital in favor of a scrapbook.
I started by separating my photos and stuff into days, effectively breaking the journey into manageable segments to better tell the story. I then

brainstormed (see right) and came up with the idea to create a front page for each day that would have a similar look. Each day page would have a map of the day's travels, a title, something showing mileage, and something showcasing these awesome date stamps I got from Staples. Since all the colors of California are in the greens, blues, creams, yellows and browns family, I decided on a deep, dark brown paper to build the day pages on (see below). I printed out maps from google, pulled out my huge letter stamps, found some packing tags (also from Staples) and practiced stamping some layouts.

In addition, I decided on this gorgeous green scrapbook (I love green) that has a chocolate brown tab, and the inside is the same rich brown that I wanted for the day pages.
Each day ended up with a map, labels and small pictures representative of some of the pictures to come. Plus a fun label with the location, mileage, and date, plus a (I think) clever title.


Some of the tentative layout for the airplane travel days...

Some shots of where the layout is now....


Next step: stamping the title and starting layout.