Thursday 27 August 2015

My holiday scrapbooks

I've always loved documenting things. It's one of the reasons that I've kept up with this blog for so long! I enjoy writing about things that I've done, preserving memories, and if possible presenting them in an attractive way. For some reason though, the more popular hobby of scrapbooking has never appealed to me. Instead of using actual photographs I always preferred to use other types of memorabilia - tickets, postcards, pictures cut from leaflets and so on - to illustrate my writing.

I have great memories from my early camping holidays in France, sitting in the tent and filling up exercise books with cut out pictures and notes. I still have them, and they are great to look back on, I can definitely recall places that we visited and things we did that I would otherwise have forgotten. It was such a fun part of my childhood holidays that I've been encouraging my children to do the same, and I've blogged about how to create a holiday scrapbook with young children

Here are a couple of pages from my French scrapbooks, dating back to 1991 and 1992.

Old holiday vacation diaries and scrapbooks

Since Ram and I got together we've been lucky enough to travel widely, and from the very beginning of our adventures together I wrote them up when we returned home. I would take an exercise book with me to write in at the end of each day, as well as a small plastic folder to collect various bits and pieces. I often even took a small pair or scissors along so that I could cut pictures out and save space in the suitcase.

The notes were written up in A5 sketchbooks using gel pens. To begin with I used a rainbow of colours but I eventually settled on black. Copying everything out again did take time of course, but back in those pre-children days I had all the time in the world! There was almost a disaster when towards the end of our five week long around the world trip I left my holiday notebook behind on the plane - fortunately it was waiting for me in the lost property but it caused me a lot of stress at the time!

Old holiday vacation diaries and scrapbooks

I don't keep these scrapbooks any more, partly because I don't have as much time as I once did, but mainly because this blog has replaced them. I write about many more of our activities on the blog now, in particular days out, which I never had a record of before. It's also so easy to pop photographs into a blog post, and I use my smash book for storing the odd little bits and pieces of paper.

I love reading through my old holiday scrapbooks, and I really do need to think about preserving them digitally. These days it would be easy enough to at least snap a photograph of each page and back them up somewhere securely, definitely something that I need to get around to! I was looking through them recently which inspired me to write this post, and Harry enjoyed reading through them too. I'm afraid that they are mainly factual and quite boring to anyone that wasn't there, although I did find a couple of pages where I had gone all poetical about Venice which was quite fun to read back. I'm planning on sharing that in a separate post!

How do you preserve the memories of things that you've done?

8 comments:

  1. I have so much in common with you, I absolutely love to document things... anything... but especially my children and our travels. I do adore scrapbooking and I have thought about trying a smash book... I don't do traditional scrapbooking as much as I like doing my own art while scrapping, so maybe I'd really love a smash book!
    I hope you have a great weekend!
    Tammy

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    1. A smash book is great because there isn't as much pressure to make it look perfect, you can just bung things in and scribble a few notes, and it would work perfectly with art work. I also only feel the need to make a page or two for each holiday rather than trying to complete a whole scrapbook.

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  2. When I was younger we had exercise books which we wrote a short snippet of what we had done each day, now I try and do one with the boys-although time has escaped us this holiday and we haven't put ours together yet!

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    1. I've tried to do them with my son and it's really good to have the memories to look back on from his perspective. I find that I need to pick the right moment though and sometimes it's difficult to fit it in while we are away and then I forget about it when we get home!

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  3. Reading this has reminded me of holiday scrap books I made as a kid. Unfortunately they are long gone, but I can imagine they would have been great fun to read now. My holiday memories are very much recorded in my blog and digital photo albums. I've started to try to keep other memorabilia but it's not organised. A scrap book may be the answer!

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    1. I'm glad that I managed to hang on to my earlier holiday scrap books, although I'm sure there must have been more that have disappeared over time. I've found my blog a great way to record memories, especially as it's so easy to just pop the photos in.

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  4. I've often wanted to do scrapbooks, and usually pick up lots of stuff to stick in which builds up in folders. My memories will be limited to my diaries and photographs. I have encouraged my daughter to write a few diary entries on holiday (haven't got as far as full scrapbook) and hoped to start one with my son this year, but didn't find the right moment.

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    1. I've had some great success with doing a diary while on holiday with the children, and sometimes it just hasn't worked out at all. We are often quite busy and it's difficult to find the time, or else the children just want to relax when we are in our hotel room not sit at a desk and write. Then when we get back home it has all been forgotten and it's too late.

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