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?

Using your Scrapbook as a Journal

I found a great book about journaling as part of your scrapbooking experience a while ago. Now, this made a lot of sense to me, because I'd watched my mother write travel journal after travel journal. However, she then simply sticks them in the front of her albums and adds all the pictures behind the travel journal. I never liked that style of journaling, because it created such a divorce between text and pictures. Up until I saw the book on incorporating journaling into your scrapbooks, I scrapbooked mostly by using pictures and adding captions. But over time, I noticed that so many of the stories associated with the pictures got lost.

My usual method of journaling involves writing out the whole story in one long block of text (if I'm doing it on the computer) or writing a rough draft (if I'm going to be journaling by hand). Then I break that block of text down into smaller segments so as not to overwhelm any one page with a massive amount of text and add pictures as I go.

The page on the top left is done using a computer and printing out the text on one page with plenty of space in between the blocks for a nice edge finish. It is from a set of pages about my in-laws visiting us in DC. I broke the journal down into the separate days, and at the beginning of each "day" I put in my block of text. All of the text throughout is on the same color paper, to bind the story together, but that's certainly not a requirement. I find that journaling in this way helps me with my captioning, because I can refer back to a phrase in the text without having to worry about people being able to figure out the greater context of the picture.

The page on the right is from a trip I took to Boundary Waters in Minnesota. The trip leaders had us write about our experience while we there and sent us what we had written a few months later. I actually wrote out the whole story on cardstock and used it in place of regular journaling, since it captured exactly what was in my mind at the time of the trip. Again, I broke the text down into smaller chunks, and added one of the blocks of text every few pages. I also added the little notes that we wrote to each other at the end of the trip as an added reminder of the my adventure.

The actual text I had written during the trip, I added to the very back page of the scrapbook, using the letter I had received from my trip leaders as a sort of "envelope." To do this, I glued down both sides and across the bottom of the letter, and then about halfway down the page I added another line of glue to create a pocket for my pages.

This same method can be applied by keeping a travel journal and then using what you wrote during the trip as part of your scrapbooking layout.

First Commission

Crafting is such a big part of my life, that some part of it is bound to end up in a scrapbook. In this case, I received a commission for a cross-stitch piece for a friend's after-school soccer program. I took pictures of the process, as well as several close-ups of different elements.

The page may seem a bit cluttered, but that's just the way I operate. I liked the idea of being able to see the progression from start to finish without having to continue on the next page. You can see, the big block of text on the left is the story about the commission and finishing the piece. I'll blog about journaling in your scrapbook in the next entry.

I think the hardest part about the commission was finding a good way to do the soccer ball, so I used the closeup of that on the page as well. All in all, I'm really satisfied with the way it turned out.