A mini travel journal...

You know how you take so many photos on holiday which you fully intend to scrap? But somehow, there are so many that the process of selecting which ones you actually want to create a whole layout with seems almost too daunting. You keep putting it off. And in the end you start to forget some of the memories you wanted to record in the first place!

Thats where travel journal's come into their own. In the last couple of years I have made trips to various places in Italy, and fell in love particularly with the city of Florence. But I haven't got round to scrapping any of the photos yet. So when I was sent a Basic Grey chipboard mini album and the gorgeous Dream Street Art Nouveau range of papers, I knew that I would use them to make my own little journal of memories and images of the trip.

I started by working out the order of my pages, which photos to print out small, how much journalling I wanted to write, what embellishments I would use. I decided to blow up some of the photos from the trip to create whole pages on their own which I would write mini subtitles on using paint and gel pen.

I wanted to create an aged look, so I used files and plenty of paint to distress the edges of the album. I found an old copy of a map of Florence on the internet which I printed and tore into sections to add interest to my pages. I also used my favourite stamp to add detail.

The flowers are by Prima, and I added extra embellishment with buttons from my own collection. I used a mixture of black and white pens for my journalling, to ensure it showed up on the different background papers. The title on the front page is housed in a bookplate which I distressed with paint.

I'm really pleased with the finished result - I love going back to look at the photos and the whole album is really tactile and inviting.