Travel memories: our newest photo albums

February is ending, and with it, the two most nostalgic months of the year come to an end.

Lately January & February have been also the coldest months, much more than in December, which means flu flying on every corner & lots of indoor time. Well, I have had both things, flu with high fever last week (not pretty) which meant that the blog & IG have been quieter than usual, and also more time at home.

Combine home & nostalgia and you’ll get me instantly dreaming about olde travel fun. As soon as I got our Cotswolds photo albums from the printer, I thought it would be great to share some pictures here of how the last travel albums turned out.

I have all of them lined in a bookcase in our living room, a colorful bunch of keepsakes containers, and it’s frequent that I take them to flip their pages. I think creating photo albums is one of the best ways we’ve found to keep the memories of our travels more present. How do you store your travel pictures? Do you print them? Or, maybe, prefer to have them in your phone?

We use Blurb for our photo albums. In case you are curious, we use their Premium paper with matte finish and the hardcover with imagewrap (although the dust jacket look good too!). We have tried all of their papers and we have finally settled on this one because is what I prefer for our pictures. I think the only one that have not tried yet is their layflat photo books, ha!

Let’s see our last 3 (well, in fact, 8, ehem…) new travel books!

Japan

For Japan I created see-through letters saying “Nippon/Nihon” (Japan) in japanese letters for the covers. One easy tip is that you can put one picture on top of the other, so if you create a transparent image (.png) you’ll be able to do similar designs to this one.

Also, I usually add an index of everything featured in the books at the beginning. For road-trips like this one, I like to create maps to mark each of the stages and this time I went a little overboard (it’s Japan, you folks!) an draw a personalized map with small kawaii drawings. You’ll be seeing the map in more detail when I finish the Japan guide I’m still writing, sorry it’s taking that long but it will be worthy!

For the pictures, I like to keep a simple clean design, with only the image & page numbers. Sometimes I add small headings too!

Besides storing the pictures in albums, I also keep lots of other mementos of our trips, that would not be the traditional souvenir you’ll expect but that I love to collect, so, I create diaries with everything else. Check a post I did on how I collect them if you like this type of stuff too! I am a little behind with the diaries and I’m still finishing the one from Japan, so I will probably make a newer post with that too, stay tuned!

New York

For the New York album I created a rather bold (for me) design which was inspired by one of our favorite albums: Modern vampires of the city by Vampire Weekend. For the index, every visit represents a track from the album & we have album A and B as the two sides of a record. For every day I also added a black page with the “tracks” for that day (not pictured, facepalm!). I was super happy with the result, hope you like it too!

Juno is a New Yorker at heart, or isn’t she?

The Cotswolds

Now that all the memories are at home with us, let’s start building new ones? Are you heading to any part of the planet this year? What’s in your travel bucket list? Would love to hear!

By the way, Blurb is making a 35% discount until the 5th of March, so if you have some travel photos pending take a look!