Using Maps in your Layouts

I usually pick up brochures and/or maps when I go somewhere. I've used these in a variety of ways. Sometimes they are passive, showing the general layout of the area with my captions referencing back to items on the map or giving a more general idea of where the pictures were taken.

The picture on the left shows the map of the garden outside the National Botanical Garden in Washington, DC. I included it at the beginning of a whole series of pictures that I took in the garden. While the captions do not always reference back to items on the map, I've tried to include several wide shots of where we were in the garden, followed by close-ups of flower pictures. Then when I came to the pictures of the inside of the garden, I included another map of the building itself.

The picture on the right shows this map. I drew in the path we took through the garden. On another map, I actually numbered different rooms, and numbered sets of pictures later on to correspond back to the numbers on the map. In this case, I just drew in the path we took, and titled each page as the section of the building we were in.

This helps especially if you like journaling or just generally scrapbooking in chronological order. It helps to follow an "adventure" from start to finish. Or just give the person leafing through a better understanding of the layout.

Another way to use a map is to give a spatial sense of where something was located. In this case, I included a map of the University of Limmerick, where I spent my semester abroad. I wanted to show where my dorm was located in relation to my classes. I've used this technique with a map of Apalachicola, FL (a small town where we lived for a year). On one of the first pages of our "Florida" album, I included the full map of the (very small) city, and drew in big red dots for where our apartment was, where my hubby's work was, where my work was, and other places of note. Especially if they had corresponding pictures later in the album.

If you only have a few pictures from one location, you can use the map centrally and run string from the location on the map to the pictures around the outside of the map. I used this technique for my pictures of the Tower of London. I taped one side of the string to the part on the map it represented, and the other side I taped underneath the picture.

Do you tend to collect maps? How have you included them in scrapbooks?