Travel Scrapbook (Eastern Europe) for the Fridge

For the book-binding process, you can take 4 sheets of 8 by 11-inch printer paper and fold them in half together. For a fat book, you can do four sets of four sheets each to sew together. Perhaps add a drop of glue to the ends to seal permanently.

I bought the Sophia Recollections Washi tape to line the edges. The patterns are pleasant, but this tape does not hold as well as other Washi tapes might, so it may need to be glued down.

Cut and tape the paper around a focal point (in my case, my cruise keycard) and decorate it how you’d like. I taped it around the cardboard stock and left room on the top and bottom for writing.

I thought it would be nice to have easy two-toned butterflies, so I used the first paper (color samplers) to hole-punch them, then colored the body in.

Glue the butterfly’s body to the notebook and fold its wings up . The plan is for this scrapbook to be held to my fridge with a magnetic pen from Russia. This way, anyone can write their thoughts about the trip or scrapbook on the back. Pop-out stickers from Russia are on the cover. Colorful enough to stand out from the understated rest of the cover. I bent the Washi tape together length-wise to make a “ribbon” bookmark. It’s attached to a playing card from Russia. Using a real satin ribbon would also make a beautiful bookmark.

Welcome to Denmark in Danish is scrawled above the removable stickers. You can add in cards from the trip, and currency from the places you’ve been to, as shown inside the pocket of the first photo on the right page.

For Berlin, I used watercolors to paint a rainbow to remind me of the Christopher Street Day festival.

Using a hole-punch, you can create butterflies from leaves native to the country, and anchor it on a flap that together looks like a gift box when lifted up. Large items, such as tickets, make good pockets for putting photos in if you tape all the sides shut except for one. You can then write on the back of each photo the context, general vibe, or details of the good memory.

For Estonia’s page, I included authentic Baltic amber I received from the cruise as the i’s dot, and cut out signs from old town of Tallinn to be wrapped snugly within the O. Since there is no good “Welcome to Estonia” translation I’ve found in Estonian, I simply wrote “Eesti,” or Estonia, there on the die-cut shape. A label is on the right to add color to the page, since I was limited to B&W photo due to printing issues.

St. Petersburg was the highlight of the trip, so we had a lot of photos and souvenirs from Russia. Using the tickets as pockets, I put all the maps, Hermitage tickets, and photos we couldn’t fit on the page inside. I tried to incorporate as much meaning behind each element as possible, with the green balloon from my birthday card being a reminder of not just my birthday, but an actual green balloon with a message in it that I had brought along with me to blow up and throw off a building, but never carried out. You can trace the die-cut shape’s outline on a photo and then glue it on top for an elegant effect.

Thinking outside the box doesn’t mean you can’t think within the circles. Take advantage of all the lucky coincidences, like how F-I-N-L-A-N-D can conveniently fit into the 7 available spaces of the doily-shape. Once again, you can make butterflies out of the country’s leaves as long as you make sure to keep it flattened so that it won’t curl once it dries up.

Once again, you can make butterflies out of the country’s leaves as long as you make sure to keep it flattened so that it won’t curl once it dries up.

The towel animals are so cute! It’s the little touches that make the trip. I singed the edges of the right page with matches I had bought at the Vasa museum giftshop.

And on the tenth day we arrive in Denmark once again, at the Tivoli hotel. I cut out the bus we were on, and placed it accordingly, along with one more keycard and playing card flap you can lift up.

Voila! The final product on my fridge. The magnet is on the last page, holding the entire weight of the scrapbook up almost miraculously.
Let me know how your scrapbook turns out!