9 creative holiday scrapbook ideas for your summer photos
You’ve just had the best holiday *ever*, so now you’re trying to decide what to do with all the amazing photos you took.
Sharing holiday snaps on Instagram is all well and good, but creating a fun holiday scrapbook is the perfect way to relive your adventures and make sure you never forget a thing.
Since you might be unsure of how to make a scrapbook with photo prints, we’ve put together our favourite holiday scrapbook ideas to help you get started.
Even if you aren’t really into arts and crafts, these simple holiday scrapbook ideas are really easy to try at home!
1. Print holiday photos in various shapes and sizes
Right then, your camera roll is *bursting* with amazing holiday snaps, and now you’re ready to print your favourites for scrapbooking. Once you’ve picked the photos you’d like to include in your holiday scrapbook, you’ll need to decide how to print them.
Since you probably don’t want every scrapbook page to look the same, we recommend printing photos in a range of shapes and sizes. Standard 6x4” glossy prints are usually the most popular choice, but we love scrapbooks that mix things up with cute mini prints, quirky retro prints, and square prints (which are perfect for your Insta snaps).
In short, choosing a great mix of small and large photo prints will make every page in your holiday scrapbook feel more unique and creative!
2. Plan the layout and order of your photos
When you’ve got hold of your photo prints, it’s time to think about how you’re going to arrange them in your book. Before you start glueing or stapling anything, you’ll need to plan the chronology and layout of your scrapbook so that you know where each photo is going. Pretty obvious stuff, but it’s an important step that many people still forget about.
Whether you’re arranging photos in chronological order, by destination, or following a unique theme on every page, take some time to place your photos on each page and experiment with different layouts to ensure you have enough space!
3. Use a favourite photo as your focal point
You’ve probably taken loads of great holiday photos, but there’s bound to be some you love more than others. To make sure these photos really stand out in your holiday scrapbook, try using them as a focal point for the rest of your page to be designed around.
This involves printing your photo in a larger size (8x6” and 10x8” are good choices) and positioning it in the centre of your page. You can then add smaller illustrations, stickers, layers, text and other artistic embellishments that draw focus to your photo without distracting from it.
4. Draw a map of your adventures
From globetrotting adventures to action-packed city breaks, you’ve taken holiday photos in all kinds of amazing locations. By including maps in your holiday scrapbook, you can show exactly where each photo was taken or even plot out the entire route of your holiday (a great option if you travelled to loads of different places).
It could be a map of a city, country or the entire globe - either way, we love scrapbooks that use maps as a background and feature a photo next to each key location. You could even add dates and times under each photo to show off your holiday itinerary!
5. Fill blank spaces with sketches and decorations
Doodling little sketches to match your photo and theme is an easy way to add some creative fun to your holiday scrapbook. Once your photos have been arranged, you can bring blank spaces to life with illustrations of flowers, birds, landmarks or absolutely anything else that suits the theme of your page.
Painting light watercolour backgrounds is also a great way to add colour and depth to each page, while using calligraphy is ideal for adding titles, names, quotes and other important bits of text.
6. Make pictures pop with decorative borders and frames
When there’s too much negative space around your photos, you can use colourful ribbon, lace, themed stickers and washi tape to create beautiful borders. Better yet, you can use these same decorations to make grids and divide your page into different sections, giving you handy little areas to fill with more photos or memorabilia.
Decorative photo corners are also great for adding extra depth to your pictures - and also prevent your photos from curling at the edges!
7. Write journal entries to tell your best holiday stories
There’s a story behind every holiday photo, so add some extra meaning to selected photos by scribbling down exactly what happened. It could be an exhausting day trip, a glorious sunny view, or the best ice cream you’ve ever had - adding short journal entries to your scrapbook will let you relive those experiences all over again.
Since you probably don’t want to overdo the text, you could also try scribbling down memorable quotes and anecdotes from that particular day. Oh, and if you’re worried about your handwriting ruining the look of your scrapbook, you could always type it up instead!
8. Stash holiday tickets and trinkets inside little envelopes
You’ve likely picked up loads of great souvenirs on your holiday, so stick cute little envelopes inside your scrapbook and fill them with tickets, letters, maps, photos and any other goodies you’ve collected on your travels.
Hiding little treasures and trinkets inside envelopes isn’t just a really cute page design idea, but it also adds a fun interactive element to your scrapbook. You might want to stick all your envelopes together on one page, but we love it when envelopes are displayed beside photos and contain extra details about that memory (such as a handwritten journal entry).
Side note: you could also use a lift-the-flap technique to hide goodies throughout your holiday scrapbook, but this is usually trickier (and more advanced) than using envelopes.
9. Layer your page elements to add dimension
Holiday photos are just the beginning of your travel scrapbook. While there’s nothing wrong with keeping things clean and simple, displaying photos on their own will make your holiday scrapbook look more like a standard photo album instead.
The beauty of scrapbooking is you can get mega-creative with paper, images, borders, envelopes and all kinds of other artistic embellishments. Layering these elements on top of each other always creates a fun visual effect, allowing you to experiment with different colours, patterns and textures to add an extra dimension to your holiday scrapbook.
