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Europe Vacation 2015: Ephemera
This is the final back page of this trip. I usually use the back single page of an album to keep ephemera from the trip that didn’t fit, or didn’t make sense in other parts of the albums.
On this page you will see a color photocopy of my passport complete with all of the stamps that I got during this trip (not many since the EU allows travel between countries now), a small bag with some stickers from locations we visited that I didn’t use on the other pages, and a pocket which includes our itinerary, maps, and some other papers from the trip. The pocket was made by carefully slicing the background paper, leaving about an inch on each side. Ont he back I use scotch tape to reinforce the paper right next to the ends of the slice cut so that it doesn’t tear further, and then I tape another piece of cardboard to the back to help hold the bottom part of whatever I am putting in the pocket.
This is a great way to finish an album, and hold onto items that you don’t want to lose.
Europe Vacation 2015: Returning Home
This is the final spread of our 4 album scrapbook of our trip to Europe in summer 2015. It actually captures two days and two different flights. On the morning of July 34rd Mrs Ollmann took us to the Hamburg airport and we flew on SAS to Arlanda in Sweden. We then stayed the night at the amazing Arlanda Clarion Hotel, and left the next morning on SAS to Chicago, IL. On our long flight to Chicago we actually ended up in amazing seats with a ton of leg room (see pictures) and our own personal interactive screens. I watched 4 movies on the way home and was surprised when they announced that we were getting ready to land – it was the perfect ending to our trip!
The left hand side of this spread highlights the Arlanda Clarion Hotel with pictures out of our hotel window looking at the airport as well as our room and pool keys. I also attached a welcome card that was on our bed as well as the used the hotel stationary to journal on for this spread.
The right hand side highlights the two trips that we took, with the boarding passes resting behind some photographs from the flight. We were so impressed with our leg room that I took a picture of it and another of the personal screen that we had. I also used two photographs from that screen of our flight path as I thought it was cool to watch where we were on the trip. Thanks SAS for a great flight!
Europe Vacation 2015: Flight
Our trip started on a Saturday afternoon and we drove up to Chicago to catch an overnight flight to Copenhagen, Denmark. We flew on Scandinavian Airlines (SAS) and had a pretty good flight. I attempted to sleep but am not sure that I was too successful at it. After a short layover in Copenhagen, we flew to Arlanda Airport, one of the airports in Stockholm, Sweden.
If you follow my blog, you know that my style relies heavily on the use of ephemera – items collected during the experience – and you will see several on this page.
TIP: Read this post on “How to organize ephemera on a long trip“.
Maps: I cut the maps out of the airplane magazine and placed two of them on this page. The square one and the round one. The square one shows a traditional Mercator Projection, which makes it look like we flew in a large arc. The round one is a Mollweide projection which tries to capture that the earth is a globe. From this projection you can see that we pretty much flew a straight line between the two cities. (Click Here to find out more about Map Projections). I measured the diameter of the round map and then used my Cricut machine to cut the blue border circle of exactly the correct size.
Tickets and baggage tags: I placed our tickets and one of the baggage tags on the page and also bordered them in blue to help them stand out on the page. I like to use ticket stubs on pages because it shows dates and times, and in this case also the routes that we were taking. In the top left hand corner I used a baggage tag that I picked up from the ticket counter. I punched a hole in the plastic protector sheet and the page and pushed the elastic through the hold and taped it at the back of the page. This way it hangs free on the outside of the plastic protector page, and creates a cool effect when the page is opened.
Pictures: There are three pictures on this page: 1. Selfie of us waiting for the plane taken by my son. 2. The screen at the boarding gate, and 3. a picture of the check-in sign. I like to take pictures like this as a form of photo journaling that helps remind me of the details of the trip.
Europe Vacation 2015: Title Pages
I finally have finished our scrapbooks from our vacation to Europe during June and July 2015. We spent three weeks and managed to visit 7 countries – Denmark (Just a layover in Copenhagen), Sweden, Switzerland, Germany, France, Liechtenstein, and Austria.
The main purpose of the trip was to spend time with our two former exchange students (Jonathan in Sweden, and Luca in Germany) and a visit with our new exchange student (Henry from Germany). We spent 24 days on this vacation and I ended up creating 134 pages (65 double spreads and 8 single pages) that filled 4 albums.
Since I had 4 albums to create title pages for I wanted to make sure that they were within the same theme, but also paid homage to the particular pages that were within that album. This proved to be difficult as each album had pages of such different areas.
I settled on using the image of the European Union Flag which is 12 yellow stars on a field of blue. After I had settled on this and created the Volume 1 Title page, our current exchange student, Henry, informed me that Switzerland is not a member of the European Union.
But unfortunately i had already put the Swiss flag on the page, and decided to leave it.
Volumes 1 and 2 contain pages from our time in Sweden, and so the Volume 2 Title Page has a sticker from Sweden on it. It is convenient that the Swedish colors are blue and yellow, so that color theme is present on the Volume 2 Title Page.
Volumes 3 and 4 contain pages from our time in Germany, and so I used the same visual image, but changed the color scheme 
to the German colors – Black, red and yellow. For Volume 3 I used a “Germany” 3D sticker, and for Volume 4 I used the German Flag.
The lettering on all of the pages was cut on my Cricut machine, and I also used the Cricut Machine and Cricut Design Space to lay out the stars and cut all 4 title pages. In order to easily duplicate the production process I cut the stars out of the back ground paper and then placed colored paper behind it so the the colors showed through. This was easier than trying to cut 48 stars and place them in a perfect circle on all four of the pages.
For the Volume 4 Title page I used a paper that had “Germany” written all over it which I think created a nice effect.
