By Brandon Hill on February 8, 2016 • ( Leave a comment )

Europe Vacation 2015: Swedish Royal Palace

On this day we went to visit the Swedish Royal Family in their palace in Stockholm. They were kind enough to let me take some formal pictures of them while we were there (jk!). The day before we arrived in Sweden was the royal wedding of Prince Carl Philip and Sofia Hellqvist. Prince Carl is the second born of the Royal family, and I was able to watch the wedding as the Johansson family had recorded it so that they could watch it later. It was so cool to walk in the places that I had just seen on the TV.

My favorite part of these two spreads is that the background is actually royal family paper napkins that I purchased in the palace gift shop. I carefully opened the napkins, turned them upside down, placed white card stock on top of them, and then folded the napkin over the edges and taped down tightly. (Note: I have learned that if you are going to use this wrapping technique that you must cut the 12×12 cardstock down about 1/4 inch on two sides so that it will fit into the plastic protector sheets when you are done.)

The left hand page of this spread contains ephemera that I purchased in the Royal Palace gift shop: a Crown metal bookmark (middle), postcards of the royals, and the program from the tour of the palace. The program is affixed to the outside of the plastic protector sheet so that it can be viewed by the reader. To keep it from flapping open while the page is being turned, the pages are clipped together with a contemporary paper clip. The right hand page contains pictures of the banquet room and dancing hall that I saw earlier on television. The bottom right hand picture is a scale model of an earlier version of the castle that was in the castle dungeons as part of the tour.

This second spread is created in the same way as the first spread above. All of the photographs are bordered in gold paper. In this spread the left hand page show cases the entrance to the coronation room and the chapel were the royal wedding was held just 8 days earlier. The right hand page has a picture of the organ from the chapel, the entrance to the chapel, and pictures from inside the coronation room. Notice that the date in gold is the cut out which was left from creating the date plate on the first spread shown above.