More Journaling from my Travels

Howdy blog visitors.
More views today from my travel journal. 

You can see I use lots of tidbits to make it.

It was fun using stickers from my stash to finish this book off.  One day I might actually do a sketch journal, but this one is more of a collaged scrap journal.

Love these little bags you get postcards in. The fit great in the book, are a good surface to put things on and even better, you can put things into the bags. Makes the book more interactive when you can pull things out of the pockets.
And I love adding fun postcards that I pick up along the way. Some trips I use more postcards than others, and this one has quite a few since I found a lot of cool postcards I liked.

Can't forget the Sasquatch. Ha-ha-ha. Those creatures seem to make a lot of appearances in the Pacific Northwest. Not real Sasquatches (at least we didn't see any) but there are postcards, T shirts, books, all kinds of Sasquatch items. Had to include them in my book.

This next page was a pre-made one; I put it together before the trip. It is one of the original chipboard pages from the book. I only ended up using 2 of these kinds of pages.

I added another bag to the back of it. This time I added all kinds of things to decorate it up.

A bit more to show you another time. I'm off on the road today to visit my Mom again.

Thanks for stopping by.

Travel Journal

I showed you this cover page before my journey, but thought I'd show you again before we delve into some of my pages today.

I used a Maya Road 4 hole ringed notebook style with removable chipboard pages. I like the thick sturdy cover of this style. I like being able to put things into the book and move them around as the trip and after trip work develops.

So last week while I geeked out and watched the 3 episodes of PBS's "Your Inner Fish" from the record setting on the tv, I sat  on the floor and got into an arty mood with this project.

I originally had made an inner cover page using the chipboard that came with this book. But then I decided to scrap it and save it for a future project. I particularly liked this postcard I found at Target right in downtown Seattle. I think it makes a great front because of the big white printing and slightly retro photo. Can you see that A page right behind that postcard? I organized the book as the trip was organized with an A (days in Seattle), B (our National Park travels) and C (when we got to Oregon). I have a D page too, for when we headed back to Seattle to fly home.

I stamped the plane using a B Line stamped I've had for eons. This page only came with big letter A printed on it.

The page on the right was stamped with the old planes (Impression Obsession) before we left. I added the ticket and some cut up brochure info to the page, along with a bit of washi tape and a tag.

Notice the Hotel Nexus paper on the left opens up.

Makes a great place to add some things.

 Here's my B and C pages. I started with pages from an October Afternoon journal kit. I didn't use the whole kit, but I liked these pages because they made a great way to break up the journal into different legs of our trip.

I sprayed the B page and added the cardboard dots, a cardboard star and some stickers.

This is a collaging and scrapbooking project. No photos added, except for postcards, brochures and other things I scavenged along the way. But I did use some stickers, metal button sticks and paper from from stash.

My travel journals are always fun for me to make. And they're great when I look back on them later.

One of these day I will try a sketching travel journal.

Problem is when we do one of these road trip vacations we don't seem t sit still long enough to sketch.

I'll spare you a super long post today.

Will be back with more snaps of my travel journal soon.

Travel Journal

We're off on our family vacation at the end of next week. I can't wait. This year we are flying out to Seattle, Washington and then spending 10 days doing some road tripping and exploring.

I spent yesterday inside with the AC running because it was pretty hot outside. I put together my travel journal for the trip. I had started the cover- painted it, and then I rubbed some brown ink over it to get rid  of a bit of the brightness and give it more of an older distressed look.
I hand painted the picture in the middle of the mountain. Not sure Mount Rainier or Mount Hood or any of the mountains we will see will look like my mountain, but it does look abstractly like Mount Shasta in Northern California- which is part of the same Cascade Mountain chain. So maybe. I didn't spend a lot of time trying to get all the mountain details exact, but I still am happy with the way it works on the cover. For the forest around the mountain I just brushstroked lines of green in 3 different shades-that part kind of works. All the rest of the cover is stickers I scavenged from my stash. I used to be a big scrapbooker. I actually like to scrapbook-my pages always look more journaly than the typical scrapbook page. I just haven't done as much scrapping as when my daughter was little because I've discovered how much I LOVE to play with paints, stencils and stamps.

Here is my inside cover.  I used the same green and blue paint to cover all of the cardboard pages within the book. This is a Maya Road book I picked up with a 4 ring inner binder to hold pages. It came with a lot of these bulky pages, which I like, but didn't want to use throughout the whole journal.  I used one at each end and then added one in the middle and made my own pages for the inside. Some of my inner pages are just cut pieces of paper, and some are pages I had (also from scrapbooking) that just needed some slight fixing. I also added some envelopes for pages and even a small flat paper bag I had. When I make a journal like this I often hit my stash a lot. You can see that here also. I love the saying above the word July. I recently picked up this set of travel stamps from Technique Tuesday and I think this is my favorite one in the set.

While cleaning out my classroom at the end of the year I came across a bunch of old slides that a retired teacher had had and his replacement had decided to throw away. I grabbed a bunch, not that I can use them in my classroom but figured they would make great embellishments on pages. That's where this little piece of film came from that I used on this page.

An October Afternoon page I had in my stash that I sprayed with ink, added the star, stickers and little cardboard dots (also from my stash).

Not the clearest photo, but you can see some of slides I brought home from work. Thought I would put them to use here.

A couple more fixed over pages for the journal. I have a lot of blank pages in this book and these half done pages too. I need to be able to actually keep the trip journal once we are there!  I will fill in and add things while we travel and then finish up the book once I am home. I bring my supplies- pens, Sharpies, a glue-stick, double side tape roll, scissors and a hole punch, in a little metal lunch box that goes right into my suitcase. It is amazing how little you can actually work with and how many periphery items you manage to accumulate at home when you don't need to keep it to a minimum.

One last page to show you. (Sorry this has been a long post today!) I know we will make it to at least 1 air and space museum in our travels, because my husband is really into that kind of thing. There are 2 he is talking about visiting, so maybe I will need more than this page. I just used some paper from my stash and these embellishments from my stash. Most pages I can't start to fix up since I am never exactly sure what it is we will end up doing.

Ok, time to take a breath and give my fingers a rest.

Thanks for stopping by.