Documenting Travel In Project Life | Part 01

 

Hello Lovelies! The amazing months of summer are here and for many of us that means travel plans! It is always so exciting to visit new places and experience new things, and the time spent with family and friends is priceless! It also means coming home with tons of photos, which means we can revisit those amazing memories any time we want. Honestly, that is my favorite part of traveling – coming home with a camera filled with beautiful photos that inspire me to document those wonderful memories. It can also be a bit overwhelming, deciding which photos to print, how to include the travels into our albums, how to capture all the magic we experienced! So I thought I would spend a bit of time sharing my process for including our travels into our Project Life albums for this summer through this mini series! I am so glad you are here and I hope you will find tons of inspiration and tips for your summer travels as well!

For today, I wanted to share an Introduction to this series and invite you to view the chat video here. In this video I talk about some of my personal thoughts as I approach these layouts, photos, and stories, and I hope it will help you think about your travel documenting in helpful ways too!

Here are the video notes:

Documenting travel can be a bit challenging and can be where we get stuck, but it doesn’t have to be that way. One of the many reasons I love pocket page scrapbooking is that it allows me to include the best memories in a way that is not so overwhelming. I can set aside however many layouts I want to complete for a particular trip, have the page design already laid out, and some of the hard thinking has been already done. It is also a project that is very high on my priority list, and that means I want to stay on track with this project. Here are a few tips to help you stay on track as well.

Tip #01

Keep this part of your memory keeping manageable. It is easy to get overwhelmed with all the projects, photos, layouts, page styles, stories, everything. It is very easy to just skip it, or drop the project altogether because you just don’t know what to do or how to start. So how can we keep this manageable and overcome that fear? What feels manageable to you might be very different from what is manageable to me, but setting a limit within our Project Life albums and setting a limit for product we want to use and setting a limit for photos to print is a great place to start. It is probably a bit unrealistic to think you will be able to document every single memory from your trip in one single layout. And honestly, if you want to document every memory, you can do that but I recommend committing another project for that purpose. For the purpose of Project Life, however, it is ok to hit the highlights and call it done. So lay out in your mind what you can realistically accomplish within this album, how many layouts you want to devote to this trip, and stick with that.

This particular layout from our 2018 album is all about a day trip we took right here in town, in Winston Salem, NC. We wanted to check out a vintage arcade called Reboot, and we walked around a bit downtown as well. Notice how the photos in this layout tell a bit about what we did, but they also show some of the relationships and personalities in our family. This layout is a great representation of this one week in our life without feeling overwhelming or being too hard.

Tip #02

I already mentioned the temptation of wanting to include every single detail, and I am here to tell you that if wanting to include every detail is stopping you from finishing your albums, let that go. We don’t have to include every single experience. We don’t have to print every photo. We don’t have to tell every story. Not in this album, not in this context. I absolutely LOVE Project Life because it lets me tell our family stories in bite-size chunks. I tell my students in the In My Pocket class to think about how to represent your experiences in your pocket pages. What are the photos that represent this experience for you? Print and include those. What are the photos that really summarize the experience for you? How can you represent the trip you took, in one or two or three layouts, using 7 or 15 or 20 photos? Once you have set your limits for documenting this trip, prioritize the photos and include the ones that really jump out at you. You can always do more layouts later, you can always create another album about the trip later, but just for now, for the purposes of continuing in your Project Life album, make the effort to represent.

This layout is from our 2012 album and represents a trip we took to the Outer Banks of NC. To keep this manageable, but still tell the important stories I wanted to tell, I included photos of each of the children, which highlights their responses to being at the beach, a photo of our location, and an excellent representation of the skies, ocean, and weather we had while we were there. What is most important to me is to document our family interacting and experiencing life together, and these seven photos do that in a really powerful way. Never underestimate how beautiful just 7 or 8 photos really can be.

Tip #03

The most important thing I hope you will keep in mind as you document your own summer travels (or any travels, or any memories) is to do the thing that keeps you engaged with the project, do whatever helps you to keep going. Our goal in Project Life is completed albums, right? My personal goal at Larkindesign is to help you uncomplicate memory keeping so you can complete albums and feel accomplished in your craft. I do believe you will love looking back through your albums and seeing your travels included in Project Life, so I encourage you to create a layout (or three, or five, if you wish) about your trip. I see that question in our community an awful lot: “Should I make a layout for our trip if I’m going to make another mini album for the trip?” And my answer is always a resounding YES. You can always come back and do the full album later, but if you never get the chance to make that album, you know you have included it in Project Life.

Back in 2012, the last week of the year, we visited Disney World and on our way back our car broke down. We were three hours outside of Orlando, an hour from Jacksonville, on New Year’s Day, with nothing open. We had quite a journey that day to figure out how to get our family of six and a broken down car back home! Happy New Year to us, right?! I of course included this in my layout for the first week of that year because that was a significant travel event, and I am always happy to see that layout in that album. You can see that layout above, which shows how we celebrated New Years Eve at Hollywood Studio and then shows our poor car once we brought it home. I hope this mini series will inspire you! We are going to have some fun, use some pretty products, and tell some special stories.

~Theresa

Are you interested in learning more about Travel Scrapbooking? We have just the class for you, and it is coming soon on September 16, 2021. You can sign up below to reserve your spot, simply click on the image and add it to your cart. See you there!