Vacation Scrapping While Vacationing

I've invited Michele Anderson to share with you how she completes vacation scrapping while still on vacation! Take a look at her process.

I’ve spent some time over the last couple years and last few vacations creating a system that allows me to scrap on the go and return with a completed trip documented. With a bit of planning, you too can return with completed pages that do not get lost in the shuffle of the day to day.

Before leaving for the trip I prep a folder with a daily starter page for each day that we will be traveling:

I create these pages for the folder all in Design A. Prior to the Project Life App getting the upgrade option of “Free Form Text” or “FFT” I used the app Over to create a daily page number photo that I could stick into any slot in the designated page. Now, I would not do this in Over, I’d use a blank card and FFT right in the Project Life App. I’m always looking for ways to streamline my process. I would create one “Day” cards and make copies and change the #1 to 2, 3, 4, etc. depending on how many days I was going to be gone.

*You will notice on my completed pages that I do not stick with Design A exclusively, I just use that as a starting point for prep purposes and let my photos dictate the page layout.

I then put the cards in a folder in the app. Here you can see this was going to be a five-day trip and I prepped for those five days. You will also see that the page name label is important. I label my pages by day and then start with A. As I add additional pages for the same day I keep the day number and add B, C, D…etc. This labeling system puts the pages automatically in order if you chose to display pages by name at the top of the folder.

*You will be able to see the extended page name labels (2A, 2B, 2C, 2D, etc) below.

You will notice that this premade page has a “Hello Sunshine” card already in a slot. We were traveling from cold Minnesota to sunny Florida so I knew I wanted to use this card on day one so I put it in ahead of time. If you know of specific items that you will use on a specific day, preload that. Some examples of those things could be an itinerary for a day trip, tickets to a show, or a card that perfectly describes seeing family you haven’t in a while. The options are endless and a little prep ahead of time helps a lot.

I like to be able to easily access travel themed products from my stash while on the go, so I organize them in a way that makes them easy to find. I use iCloud drive, but you could do the same in Dropbox or other storage systems. iCloud just works for me since all my devices will be synced. For this trip I created a folder that was named “Miami”.

You will notice that I put a 1 in front of the name of the folder. This moves it to the top of the drive. I do this often when working with a specific folder so that I can access it quickly. I put the travel products I thought I would want in the folder Miami and then I put a 1 in front of Miami and then it was at the top of my drive. This avoided the need to scroll through my folders to the “Ms”. I’ll remove that 1 when I’m done with the project.

The amount of photos we take during vacation tends to become overwhelming quickly so I take a couple steps to keep my photos organized. Each day I quickly make a “Day Marker” and save that at the end of the day to mark the change of day. I did create these in the app Over, but would now do it directly in the Project Life App because of Free Form Text.

When I am able to steal a couple minutes to review photos I “favorite” those I want to make sure to include on the day page. I find these few minutes when we are waiting for our Lyft to arrive, when we are waiting for a show to start, at the end of the night when we are winding down or the following morning when I’m up before everyone else. Try to find a few minutes that you can quickly review your camera roll. As I run though the day’s pages, I click the heart icon of the pictures I like and want to make sure I include. After I create the page, I remove the heart so that my favorite roll will be ready to load in the next day’s essential photos.

You can see here how I added additional pages after the initial numbering system. I like my days to be even, so I often include a special full-page photo to even out days that were an odd number of pages.

At the end of the trip, I was ready to order a book and placed that order on the way home from the airport at 11:30 PM!

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